Book Description

Excerpt from The Prelude: Or Growth of a Poet's Mind; An Autobiographical Poem The gods talk in the breath of the woods, They talk in the shaken pine, And fill the long reach of the old seashore With dialogue divine. And the poet who overhears Some random word they say, Is the fated man of men Whom the ages must obey. It is interesting in our survey of the past to study the crises in the world's history, and notice how Providence has, by particular surroundings and education, prepared special men for special emergencies. Seers, prophets, and teachers have been divinely raised up to interpret the mind of God to men, the Heroes, Sages, Bards sublime, And all that fetched the flowing rhyme From genuine springs. In one of these crises, - that of the last half of the eighteenth century, - there was a stirring of the depths in all departments of human life. Literature, the outcome of the whole life of a people, was consequently involved in the revolutionary conflagration which ran over all the European world, from the ashes of which arose new ideas of mankind. Poetry had been removed from its natural home, the country, and was forced to do service in the artificial surroundings of city life. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.