Date: w. 1795-1796, first published 1842

"In these my lonely wanderings I perceived / What mighty objects do impress their forms / To elevate our intellectual being."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

Imagination is "reason in her most exalted mood"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"This faculty [Imagination/Reason] hath been the feeding source / Of our long labour: we have traced the stream / From the blind cavern whence is faintly heard /Its natal murmur; followed it to light / And open day"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"My own voice cheered me, and, far more, the mind's / Internal echo of the imperfect sound; / To both I listened, drawing from them both / A cheerful confidence in things to come"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

The poet's mind is "best pleased / While she as duteous as the mother dove / Sits brooding, lives not always to that end, / But like the innocent bird, hath goadings on/ That drive her as in trouble through the groves."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"I neither seem / To lack that first great gift, the vital soul, / Nor general Truths, which are themselves a sort / Of Elements and Agents, Under-powers, / Subordinate helpers of the living mind"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"Nor, sedulous as I have been to trace / How Nature by extrinsic passion first / Peopled the mind with forms sublime or fair, / And made me love them, may I here omit / How other pleasures have been mine, and joys / Of subtler origin."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"Yes, I remember when the changeful earth, / And twice five summers on my mind had stamped / The faces of the moving year, even then / I held unconscious intercourse with beauty / Old as creation"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"[S]ometimes, 'tis true, / By chance collisions and quaint accidents / (Like those ill-sorted unions, work supposed / Of evil-minded fairies), yet not vain / Nor profitless, if haply they impressed / Collateral objects and appearances, / Albeit lifeless then, and doomed to sleep / Until maturer s...

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"Meanwhile, my hope has been, that I might fetch / Invigorating thoughts from former years; / Might fix the wavering balance of my mind, / And haply meet reproaches too, whose power / May spur me on, in manhood now mature, / To honourable toil."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)