Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness.

These lines come from Wordsworth’s sonnet “London, 1802,” written as an apostrophe to the recently deceased poet and republican thinker John Milton. Composed in the early nineteenth century amid Wordsworth’s disillusionment with what he saw as England’s moral and civic decline—commercialism, political complacency, and a loss of “inward happiness”—the poem calls on Milton as a model of public virtue and spiritual independence. The quoted passage is part of the sonnet’s concluding praise, contrasting Milton’s solitary integrity and powerful moral voice with the perceived corruption and triviality of contemporary public life.

Wordsworth idealizes Milton as a figure of austere, luminous integrity: a soul “like a star” suggests both elevation and principled distance from worldly compromise. The “voice…like the sea” evokes vastness, authority, and a natural, elemental force—Milton’s speech as morally cleansing and irresistibly powerful. “Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free” frames Milton’s character as unadorned, dignified, and independent, while “life’s common way” emphasizes that such greatness can be lived within ordinary human circumstances. The phrase “cheerful godliness” fuses piety with steadiness and joy, proposing a civic spirituality that could renew a degraded nation.