Ye blessed creatures, I have heard the call Ye to each other make; I see The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee; My heart is at your festival. My head hath its coronal,{9} The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all. Oh evil day if I were sullen While Earth herself is adorning This sweet May morning, And the children are culling On every side, In a thousand valleys far and wide, Fresh flowers, while the sun shines warm, And the babe leaps up{10} on his mother's arm: I hear, I hear, with joy I hear! --But there's a tree,{11} of many, one, A single field which I have looked upon, Both of them speak of something that is gone: The pansy{12} at my feet Doth the same tale repeat. Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream? V. Our birth is but a sleep{13} and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home. Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The youth, who daily farther from the East Must travel, still is nature's priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day. VI. Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own; Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, And even with something of a mother's mind, And no unworthy aim, The homely nurse doth all she can To make her foster-child, her inmate man, Forget the glories he hath known, And that imperial palace whence he came. VII.