Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored;
Which at this moment, on my waking sight
Appears to shine, by miracle restored!
My soul, though yet confined to earth,
Rejoices in a second birth;
--'Tis past, the visionary splendour fades;
And night approaches with her shades.

For those to whom the mission of Wordsworth appears before all
things as a religious one there is something solemn in the spectacle
of the seer standing at the close of his own apocalypse, with the
consciousness that the stiffening brain would never permit him to
drink again that overflowing sense of glory and revelation; never,
till he should drink it new in the kingdom of God. He lived, in fact,
through another generation of men, but the vision came to him no more.

Or if some vestige of those gleams
Survived, 'twas only in his dreams.

We look on a man's life for the most part as forming in itself a
completed drama. We love to see the interest maintained to the close,
the pathos deepened at the departing hour. To die on the same day is
the prayer of lovers, to vanish at Trafalgar is the ideal of heroic
souls. And yet--so wide and various are the issues of life--there is
a solemnity as profound in a quite different lot. For if we are
moving among eternal emotions we should have time to bear witness
that they are eternal. Even Love left desolate may feel with a proud
triumph that it could never have rooted itself so immutably amid the
joys of a visible return as it can do through the constancies of
bereavement, and the lifelong memory which is a lifelong hope. And