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)

Date: 1850

"Who that shall point as with a wand and say / 'This portion of the river of my mind / Came from yon fountain?'"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"An auxiliar light / Came from my mind, which on the setting sun / Bestowed new splendour"

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"My seventeenth year was come; / And, whether from this habit rooted now / So deeply in my mind, or from excess / In the great social principle of life / Coercing all things into sympathy, / To unorganic natures were transferred / My own enjoyments; or the power of truth / Coming in revelation, d...

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Date: 1850

"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."

— Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)