Date: 1807

"For oft when on my couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood, / They [the daffodils] flash upon that inward eye / which is the bliss of solitude."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1810

"If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his righ...

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: w. 1798-1800, 1814

"To these emotions, whencesoe'er they come, / Whether from breath of outward circumstance, / Or from the Soul--an impulse to herself-- / I would give utterance in numerous verse."

— 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

"Even now appears before the mind's clear eye
That self-same village church"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

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

"In trivial occupations, and the round / Of ordinary intercourse, our minds / Are nourished and invisibly repaired."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"And, as the horizon of my mind enlarged, / Again I took the intellectual eye / For my instructor, studious more to see / Great truths, than touch and handle little ones."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)