Page:The Excursion, Wordsworth, 1814.djvu/196

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170

Fell Human-kind—to banishment condemned
That flowing years repealed not: and distress
And grief spread wide; but Man escaped the doom
Of destitution;—Solitude was not.
—Jehovah—shapeless Power above all Powers,
Single and one, the omnipresent God,
By vocal utterance, or blaze of light,
Or cloud of darkness, localized in heaven,
On earth, enshrined within the wandering ark;
Or, out of Sion, thundering from his throne
Between the Cherubim—on the chosen Race
Showered miracles, and ceased not to dispense
Judgments, that filled the Land from age to age
With hope, and love, and gratitude, and fear;
And with amazement smote;—thereby to assert
His scorned, or unacknowledged Sovereignty.
And when the One, ineffable of name,
In nature indivisible, withdrew
From mortal adoration or regard,
Not then was Deity engulphed, nor Man,
The rational Creature, left, to feel the weight
Of his own reason, without sense or thought
Of higher reason and a purer will,