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 thoughts - He is insensibly subdued
To settled quiet: he is one by whom
All efforts seems forgotten, one to whom
Long patience has such mild composure given,
The 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
"Sir! I am going many miles to take
"A last leave of my son, a mariner,
"Who from a sea-fight has been brought to Falmouth,
And there is dying in an hospital."

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a major Romantic poet. Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge together produces Lyrical Ballads in 1798, an important work in the English Romantic Movement. Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey was considered by literary critics as a premier romantic work in which Wordsworth discussed a new type of verse form - blank verse.

1. bespeak: bear witness to
2. subdued: sad, dejected
3. doth: (archaic) does
4. behold: observe
5. whither: (archaic) to what place
6. bound: (here) walk