William Wordsworth - The Prelude

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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.

William Wordsworth
Knowledge and increase of enduring joy
From the great Nature that exists in works
Of mighty Poets.

William Wordsworth
One interior life in which all beings live with God, themselves are God, existing in the mighty whole, indistinguishable as the cloudless east is from the cloudless west, when all the hemisphere is one cerulean blue.

William Wordsworth
A babe, by intercourse of touch I held mute dialogues with my Mother's heart.

William Wordsworth
Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.

William Wordsworth
And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,
The self-sufficing power of Solitude.

William Wordsworth
There is
One great society alone on earth:
The noble Living and the noble Dead.

William Wordsworth
To thee
Science appears but what in truth she is,
Not as our glory and our absolute boast,
But as a succedaneum, and a prop
To our infirmity.

William Wordsworth
We were brothers all
In honour, as in one community,
Scholars and gentlemen.

William Wordsworth
Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.

William Wordsworth
All shod with steel
We hissed along the polished ice, in games
Confederate.

William Wordsworth
Yet still the solitary cliffs
Wheeled by me—even as if the earth had rolled
With visible motion her diurnal round!

William Wordsworth
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.

William Wordsworth
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

William Wordsworth
Spirits overwrought
Were making night do penance for a day
Spent in a round of strenuous idleness.

William Wordsworth
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.

William Wordsworth
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.

William Wordsworth
Not in Utopia,—subterranean fields,—
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,—the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!

William Wordsworth
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.

William Wordsworth
And from my pillow, looking forth by light
Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The antechapel where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
On Isaac Newton

William Wordsworth
All things have second birth;
The earthquake is not satisfied at once.

William Wordsworth
I shook the habit off
Entirely and for ever, and again
In Nature's presence stood, as now I stand,
A sensitive being, a creative soul.

William Wordsworth
Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak A lasting inspiration, sanctified By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how; Instruct them how the mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells.

William Wordsworth
Those were the days
Which also first emboldened me to trust
With firmness …
that I might leave
Some monument behind me which pure hearts
Should reverence.

William Wordsworth
Imagination, which in truth,
Is but another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And Reason, in her most exalted mood.

William Wordsworth
And, through the turnings intricate of verse,
Present themselves as objects recognised,
In flashes, and with glory not their own.

William Wordsworth
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.

William Wordsworth
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.

William Wordsworth
But Europe at that time was thrilled with joy, France standing on the top of golden hours, And human nature seeming born again.

William Wordsworth