William Wordsworth

The earth was 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.

The light that never was, on sea or land, the consecration, and the poet's dream.

The rapt one, of the godlike forehead, the heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth: and Lamb, the frolic and the gentle, has vanished from his lonely hearth.

Then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils.

These feeble and fastidious times.

Three sleepless nights I passed in sounding on, through words and things, a dim and perilous way.

Truths that wake, to perish never.

We meet thee, like a pleasant thought, when such are wanted.

Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all the dreary intercourse of daily life.

O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would find A tale in everything.

One great society alone on earth: the noble living and the noble dead.

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow for old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago.

Scorn not the sonnet. Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.

Society became my glittering bride, And airy hopes my children.

Strength in what remains behind.

That time is past, and all its aching joys are now no more, and all its dizzy raptures. Not for this faint i, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts have followed; for such loss, I would believe, abundant recompense. For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue. And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man; a motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things. Therefore am I still a lover of the meadows and the woods, and mountains; and of all that we behold from this green earth; of all the mighty world of eye, and ear,?both what they half create, and what perceive; well pleased to recognize in nature and the language of the sense, the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being.

The feather, whence the pen Was shaped that traced the lives of these good men, Dropped from an angel's wing.

The little unremembered acts of kindness and love are the best parts of a person's life.

The reason firm, the temperate will, endurance, foresight, strength, and skill; perfect woman, nobly planned, to warn, to comfort, and command.

There are in our existence spots of time that with distinct pre-eminence retain a renovating virtue, whence . . . our minds are nourished and invisibly repaired.

Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum of things forever speaking. That nothing of itself will come, but we must still be seeking?

Three years she grew in sun and shower, then nature said, 'a lovelier flower on earth was never sown; this child I to myself will take; she shall be mine, and I will make a lady of my own.?

Turning, for them who pass, the common dust of servile opportunity to gold.

We must be free or die who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake, the faith and morals hold Which Milton held.

Nor less I deem that there are powers which of themselves our minds impress; that we can feed this mind of ours in a wise passiveness.