More sweet than odors caught by him who sails Near spicy shores of Araby the blest, A thousand times more exquisitely sweet, The freight of holy feeling which we meet In thoughtful moments, wafted by the gales From fields where good men walk, and bowers wherein they rest. The following sonnet may be commended to warriors and statesmen, as containing a wisdom as practical in its application as it is lofty in its conception: I grieved for Bonaparté with a vain And an unthinking grief! The tenderest mood Of that man’s mind—what can it be? What food Fed his first hopes? What knowledge could _he_ gain? ’Tis not in battles that from youth we train The Governor who must be wise and good, And temper with the sternness of the brain Thoughts motherly and meek as womanhood. Wisdom doth live with children round her knees; Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk Of the mind’s business; these are the degrees By which true sway doth mount; this is the stalk True Power doth grow on; and her rights are these. We will now extract a magnificent example of abstract imagination, growing out of the meditative imagination, and penetrated by it. It is the “Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland;” the “two voices” are England and Switzerland. Two Voices are there; one is of the sea, One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice: In both from age to age thou didst rejoice, They were thy chosen music; Liberty! There came a Tyrant, and with holy glee Thou fought’st against him; but hast vainly striven: Thou, from thy Alpine holds at length art driven, Where not a torrent murmurs, heard by thee. Of one deep bliss thine ear hath been bereft: Then cleave, O cleave to that which still is left; For, high-souled Maid, what sorrow would it be That mountain Floods should thunder as before, And Ocean bellow from his rocky shore, And neither awful Voice be heard by thee! Of the ecstatic movement of Wordsworth’s imagination, we might extract numberless instances, rushing up, as it does, from the level of his meditations, throughout his poetry. Take the following, from the “Ode to Duty”: Stern Law-giver! yet thou dost wear The Godhead’s most benignant grace; Nor know we any thing so fair As is the smile upon thy face; _Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,_ _And fragrance in thy footing treads;_ _Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;_ _And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong._ In a descriptive poem called “The Gipsies,” there is a very striking instance of rapture immediately succeeding calmness: