Explore "Animal Tranquillity and Decay" by William Wordsworth on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The little hedge-row birds / That peck along the road, regard him not.
He travels on, and in his face, his step, / His gait, is one expression; every limb, / His look and bending figure, all bespeak / A man who does not move with pain, but moves / With thought.
-- He is insensibly subdued / To settled quiet: he is one by whom / All effort seems forgotten; one to whom / Long patience hath such mild composure given, / That patience now doth seem a thing of which / He hath no need. He is by nature led / To peace so perfect, that the young behold / With envy, what the Old Man hardly feels.
-I asked him whither he was bound, and what / The object of his journey: he replied / That he was going many miles to take / A last leave of his Son, a Mariner, / Who from a sea-fight had been brought to Falmouth, / And there was dying in an hospital.