The Prelude

Quotes

1. And Como! thou, a treasure whom the earth

   Keeps to herself, confined as in a depth

   Of Abyssinian privacy. I spake

   Of thee, thy chestnut woods, and garden plots

   Of Indian-corn tended by dark-eyed maids;

   Thy lofty steeps, and pathways roofed with vines,

   Winding from house to house, from town to town,

   Sole link that binds them to each other; walks,

   League after league, and cloistral avenues,

   Where silence dwells if music be not there:

   While yet a youth undisciplined in verse,

   Through fond ambition of that hour, I strove

   To chant your praise; nor can approach you now

   Ungreeted by a more melodious song,

   Where tones of nature smoothed by learned art

   May flow in lasting current. Like a breeze

   Or sunbeam over your domain I passed

   In motion without pause; but ye have left

   Your beauty with me, a serene accord

   Of forms and colors, passive, yet endowed

   In their submissiveness with power as sweet

   And gracious, almost might I dare to say,

   As virtue is, or goodness; sweet as love,

   Or the remembrance of a generous deed,

   Or mildest visitation of pure thought,

   When God, the giver of all joy, is thanked

   Religiously, in silent blessedness;

   Sweet as this last herself, for such it is.

2. 

   A day

   Spent in a round of strenuous idleness.

3. 

   Nor was it mean delight

   To watch crude Nature work in untaught minds;

   To note the laws and progress of belief;

   Though obstinate on this way, yet on that

   How willingly we travel, and how far!

   To have, for instance, brought upon the scene

   The champion, Jack the Giant-killer: Lo!

   He dons his coat of darkness; on the stage

   Walks, and achieves his wonders, from the eye

   Of living Mortal covert, "as the moon

   Hid in her vacant interlunar cave."

   Delusion bold! and how can it be wrought?

   The garb he wears is black as death, the word

   "Invisible" flames forth upon his chest.

4. 

   Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze,

   A visitant that while it fans my cheek

   Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings

   From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.

   Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come

   To none more grateful than to me; escaped

   From the vast city, where I long had pined

   A discontented sojourner: now free,

   Free as a bird to settle where I will.

5. 

   All moveables of wonder, from all parts,

   Are here—Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,

   The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig,

   The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire,

   Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl,

   The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes,

   The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft

   Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,

   All out-o'-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,

   All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts

   Of man, his dullness, madness, and their feats

   All jumbled up together, to compose

   A Parliament of Monsters.

6. 

   The earth is all before me. With a heart

   Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,

   I look about; and should the chosen guide

   Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,

   I cannot miss my way.

7. 

   With the din

   Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;

   The leafless trees and every icy crag

   Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills

   Into the tumult sent an alien sound

   Of melancholy.

8. 

   The budding rose above the rose full blown.

9. 

   Whether we be young or old,

   Our destiny, our being's heart and home,

   Is with infinitude, and only there;

   With hope it is, hope that can never die,

   Effort and expectation, and desire,

   And something evermore about to be.

10. 

    Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

    But to be young was very heaven!

11. 

    Characters of the great Apocalypse,

    The types and symbols of Eternity,

    Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.

12. 

    Leaving the tumultuous throng,

    To cut across the reflex of a star

    That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed

    Upon the glassy plain.

13. 

    Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up

    Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.

14. 

    When from our better selves we have too long

    Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,

    Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,

    How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.

15. 

    There's not a man

    That lives who hath not known his god-like hours.

16. 

    Multitudes of hours

    Pilfered away, by what the Bard who sang

    Of the Enchanter Indolence hath called

    "Good-natured lounging," and behold a map

    Of my collegiate life.

17. 

    Go to the Poets, they will speak to thee

    More perfectly of purer creatures;—yet

    If reason be nobility in man,

    Can aught be more ignoble than the man

    Whom they delight in, blinded as he is

    By prejudice, the miserable slave

    Of low ambition or distempered love?

18. 

    How oft, amid those overflowing streets,

    Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said

    Unto myself, "The face of every one

    That passes by me is a mystery!"

19. 

    All shod with steel,

    We hissed along the polished ice in games

    Confederate.

20. 

    For I would walk alone,

    Under the quiet stars, and at that time

    Have felt whate'er there is of power in sound

    To breathe an elevated mood, by form

    Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,

    If the night blackened with a coming storm,

    Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are

    The ghostly language of the ancient earth,

    Or make their dim abode in distant winds.

    Thence did I drink the visionary power;

    And deem not profitless those fleeting moods

    Of shadowy exultation: not for this,

    That they are kindred to our purer mind

    And intellectual life; but that the soul,

    Remembering how she felt, but what she felt

    Remembering not, retains an obscure sense

    Of possible sublimity, whereto

    With growing faculties she doth aspire,

    With faculties still growing, feeling still

    That whatsoever point they gain, they yet

    Have something to pursue.

21. 

    Huge and mighty forms, that do not live

    Like living men, moved slowly through the mind

    By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

22. 

    Mighty is the charm

    Of those abstractions to a mind beset

    With images, and haunted by herself,

    And specially delightful unto me

    Was that clear synthesis built up aloft

    So gracefully; even then when it appeared

    Not more than a mere plaything, or a toy

    To sense embodied: not the thing it is

    In verity, an independent world,

    Created out of pure intelligence.

23. 

    Where the statue stood

    Of Newton with his prism and silent face,

    The marble index of a mind forever

    Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

24. 

    Brothers all

    In honour, as in one community,

    Scholars and gentlemen.

25. 

    'Tis told by one whom stormy waters threw,

    With fellow-sufferers by the shipwreck spared,

    Upon a desert coast, that having brought

    To land a single volume, saved by chance,

    A treatise of Geometry.

26. 

    Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows

    Like harmony in music; there is a dark

    Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles

    Discordant elements, makes them cling together

    In one society.

27. 

    Another morn

    Risen on mid-noon.

28. 

    A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

29. 

    How men lived

    Even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still

    Strangers, not knowing each the other's name.

30. 

    Here must thou be, O Man!

    Power to thyself; no Helper hast thou here;

    Here keepest thou in singleness thy state:

    No other can divide with thee this work:

    No secondary hand can intervene

    To fashion this ability; 'tis thine,

    The prime and vital principle is thine

    In the recesses of thy nature, far

    From any reach of outward fellowship,

    Else is not thine at all.

31. 

    Oh! give us once again the wishing cap

    Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat

    Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood,

    And Sabra in the forest with St. George!

    The child, whose love is here, at least, doth reap

    One precious gain, that he forgets himself.

32. 

    Frank-hearted maids of rocky Cumberland.

    p. 100

33. 

    Oh, blank confusion! true epitome

    Of what the mighty City is herself,

    To thousands upon thousands of her sons,

    Living amid the same perpetual whirl

    Of trivial objects, melted and reduced

    To one identity, by differences

    That have no law, no meaning, and no end—

    Oppression, under which even highest minds

    Must labour, whence the strongest are not free.

34. 

    Many are our joys

    In youth, but oh! what happiness to live

    When every hour brings palpable access

    Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight,

    And sorrow is not there!

35. 

    The grim shape

    Towered up between me and the stars, and still,

    For so it seemed, with purpose of its own

    And measured motion like a living thing,

    Strode after me.

36. 

    There is

    One great society alone on earth:

    The noble Living and the noble Dead.

37. 

    Yet still the solitary cliffs

    Wheeled by me—even as if the earth had rolled

    With visible motion her diurnal round!

38. 

    Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!

    Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought,

    That givest to forms and images a breath

    And everlasting motion.

39. 

    And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,

    The self-sufficing power of Solitude.

That’s all the quotes.

39 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more