Then, something moved me. Then, I wakened up More slowly than I verily write now, But wholly, at last, I wakened, opened wide The window and my soul, and let the airs And out-door sights sweep gradual gospels in, Regenerating what I was. O Life, How oft we throw it off and think,—‘Enough, Enough of life in so much!—here’s a cause For rupture;—herein we must break with Life, Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged, Maimed, spoiled for aspiration: farewell Life!’ —And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes And think all ended.—Then, Life calls to us In some transformed, apocryphal, new voice, Above us, or below us, or around.... Perhaps we name it Nature’s voice, or Love’s, Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamed To own our compensations than our griefs: Still, Life’s voice!—still, we make our peace with Life. And I, so young then, was not sullen. Soon I used to get up early, just to sit And watch the morning quicken in the grey, And hear the silence open like a flower, Leaf after leaf,—and stroke with listless hand The woodbine through the window, till at last I came to do it with a sort of love, At foolish unaware: whereat I smiled,— A melancholy smile, to catch myself Smiling for joy. Capacity for joy Admits temptation. It seemed, next, worth while To dodge the sharp sword set against my life; To slip down stairs through all the sleepy house, As mute as any dream there, and escape As a soul from the body, out of doors,— Glide through the shrubberies, drop into the lane, And wander on the hills an hour or two, Then back again before the house should stir. Or else I sate on in my chamber green, And lived my life, and thought my thoughts, and prayed My prayers without the vicar; read my books, Without considering whether they were fit To do me good. Mark, there. We get no good By being ungenerous, even to a book, And calculating profits ... so much help By so much reading. It is rather when We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge Soul-forward, headlong, into a book’s profound, Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth— ’Tis then we get the right good from a book.