Animals and Nature

O lady! we receive but what we give And in our life alone does Nature live.

Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God.

The frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind.

The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can.

He prayeth well who loveth well Both man and bird and beast.

And the owlet whoops to the wolf below, That eats the she-wolf’s young.

O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware.

“God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus!— Why look’st thou so?”—“With my crossbow I shot the Albatross.”

Oh, Brignal banks are wild and fair, And Greta woods are green, And you may gather garlands there Would grace a summer queen.

In listening mood she seemed to stand, The guardian Naiad of the strand.

The stag at eve had drunk his fill, Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill, And deep his midnight lair had made In lone Glenartney’s hazel shade.

Two voices are there: one is of the sea, 6 One of the mountains; each a mighty voice.

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way.

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils.

The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober coloring from an eye That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality; Another race hath been, and other palms are won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

High instincts before which our mortal nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.

O joy! that in our embers Is something that doth live, That nature yet remembers What was so fugitive!

Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me.

Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her.

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colors and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye.

One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.

Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.