William Wordsworth

Quotes

1. Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up

   Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.

2. 

   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.

3. 

   There's not a man

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

4. 

   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.

5. 

   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?

6. 

   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!"

7. 

   All shod with steel,

   We hissed along the polished ice in games

   Confederate.

8. 

   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.

9. 

   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.

10. 

    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.

11. 

    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.

12. 

    Brothers all

    In honour, as in one community,

    Scholars and gentlemen.