Re-arranging Wordsworth: The Ruined Cottage (Tuesday)

'Twas summer and the sun was mounted high.
Pleasant to him who on the soft cool moss
Extends his careless limbs beside the root
Of some huge oak whose aged branches make
A twilight of their own, a dewy shade
Where the wren warbles while the dreaming man,
Half-conscious of that soothing melody,
With side-long eye looks out upon the scene,
By those impending branches made more soft,
More soft and distant. Other lot was mine.

I found a ruined house, four naked walls
That stared upon eachother. I looked round
And near the door I saw an aged Man,
Alone, and stretched upon the cottage bench;
With instaneous joy I recognised
That pride of nature and of lowly life,
That venerable Armytage, a friend
As dear to me as is the setting sun.
The old Man said, "I see around me here
Things which you cannot see: we die, my Friend
Nor we alone, but that which each man loved
And prized in his peculiar nook of earth
Dies with him or is changed, and very soon
Even of the good is no memorial left.

Why should a tear be in an old man's eye?
Why should we thus with an untoward mind
And in the weakness of humanity
From natural wisdom turn our hearts away,
To natural comfort shut our eyes and ears,
And feeding on disquiet thus disturb
The calm of Nature with our restless thoughts?"

Wordsworth, W. 1799.