Mazeppism's High Argument

Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and
Hope,
And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith;
Of blessed consolations in distress;
Of moral strength, and intellectual Power;
Of joy in wildest commonalty spread;
Of the individual Mind that keeps her own
Inviolate retirement, subject there
To Conscience only, and the law supreme
Of that Intelligence which governs all--
I sing: --"fit audience let me find though
few!"
So prayed, more gaining than he asked,
the Bard--
In holiest mood...

...the Mind of Man--
My haunt, and the main region of my song
--Beauty--a living Presence of the earth,
Surpassing the most fair ideal Forms
Which craft of delicate Spirits hath com-
posed
From earth's materials--waits upon my
steps;
Pitches her tents before me as I move,
An hourly neighbour. Paradise, and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields--like those of
old
Sought in the Atlantic Main--why should
they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.
--I, long before the blissful hour arrives,
Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal
verse
Of this great consummation:--and, by
words
Which speak of nothing more than what we
are,
Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep
of Death, and win the vacant and the vain
To noble raptures; while my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too--
Theme this but little heard of among men--
The external World is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blended
might
Accomplish:--this is our high argument.

--William Wordsworth, The Recluse, 769-825.