Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come.
William Wordsworth
These lines are always, at the same time, both familiar and fresh.
It is from Ode: Intimations of Immortality. He completed it in 1804.
Recently a Sahaja Yogi from Bristol took us hiking near Tintern Abbey in Wales. As we looked at the view, he read to us from Wordworth's Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. We were actually a couple of miles downstream from the abbey, but almost everything mentioned in the poem, we could see in the vista spread out before us.
And so uplifting. I cannot remember if it is part of a longer poem (tried to look and lost all the comment I was making). In his time I wonder if words like 'Hath' and 'cometh' were old fashioned.
It would be great if we could still use them. I tried to reword the third line and couldn't make it scan in modern english. Thanks Richard.