Date: 1850

"I have thought / Of thee, thy learning, gorgeous eloquence, / And all the strength and plumage of thy youth, / Thy subtle speculations, toils abstruse / Among the schoolmen, and Platonic forms / Of wild ideal pageantry, shaped out / From things well-matched or ill, and words for things, / The se...

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"But Nature then was sovereign in my mind, / And mighty forms, seizing a youthful fancy, / Had given a charter to irregular hopes."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"Imagination--here the Power so called / Through sad incompetence of human speech, / That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss / Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps, / At once, some lonely traveller"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"The immeasurable height / Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, / The stationary blasts of waterfalls, / And in the narrow rent at every turn / Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn, / The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, / The rocks that muttered close upon our ears, / Black...

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"Let this alone / Be mentioned as a parting word, that not / In hollow exultation, dealing out / Hyperboles of praise comparative; / Not rich one moment to be poor for ever; / Not prostrate, overborne, as if the mind / Herself were nothing, a mere pensioner / On outward forms--did we in presence ...

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"Finally, whate'er / I saw, or heard, or felt, was but a stream / That flowed into a kindred stream; a gale, / Confederate with the current of the soul, / To speed my voyage."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"Nor was it mean delight / To watch crude Nature work in untaught minds; / To note the laws and progress of belief."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"[H]ow eagerly / And with what flashes, as it were, the mind / Turned this way--that way! sportive and alert / And watchful, as a kitten when at play."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"The matter that detains us now may seem, / To many, neither dignified enough / Nor arduous, yet will not be scorned by them, / Who, looking inward, have observed the ties / That bind the perishable hours of life / Each to the other, and the curious props / By which the world of memory and though...

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"For though I was most passionately moved / And yielded to all changes of the scene / With an obsequious promptness, yet the storm / Passed not beyond the suburbs of the mind"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)