Page:Poems by William Wordsworth (1815) Volume 1.djvu/36

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
xxviii
PREFACE.

ing to recombine the multitude of Ships into one body,—the point from which the comparison set out. "So seemed," and to whom seemed? To the heavenly Muse who dictates the poem, to the eye of the Poet's mind, and to that of the Reader, present at one moment in the wide Ethiopian, and the next in the solitudes, then first broken in upon, of the infernal regions!

Modo me Thebis, modo ponit Athenis.

Hear again this mighty Poet,—speaking of the Messiah going forth to expel from Heaven the rebellious Angels,

Attended by ten thousand, thousand Saints
He onward came: far off his coming shone,—

the retinue of Saints, and the Person of the Messiah himself, lost almost and merged in the splendour of that indefinite abstraction, "His coming!"

As I do not mean here to treat this subject further than to throw some light upon the present Volumes, and especially upon one division