William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)
Major English poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, launched the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads.
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;
And humble cares,and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love, and thought, and joy.
Choice word and measured phrase, above the reach
Of ordinary men.
Where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind forever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
In modern business it is not the crook who is to be feared most, it is the honest man who doesn't know what he is doing.
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
The feather, whence the pen
Was shaped that traced the lives of these good men,
Dropped from an Angel's wing.
— A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train!
Turns his necessity to glorious gain.
But how can he expect that others should
Build for him, sow for him, and at his call
Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?
The flower of sweetest smell is shy and lowly.
Thou unassuming Common-place
Of Nature, with that homely face,
And yet with something of a grace,
Which Love makes for thee!
The soft blue sky did never melt
Into his heart; he never felt
The witchery of the soft blue sky!
Bright flower! whose home is everywhere
Bold in maternal nature's care
And all the long year through the heir
Of joy or sorrow,
Methinks that there abides in thee
Some concord with humanity,
Given to no other flower I see
The forest through.
Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good:
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.
For the gods approve
The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul.
Myriads of daisies have shone forth in flower
Near the lark's nest, and in their natural hour
Have passed away; less happy than the one
That by the unwilling ploughshare died to prove
The tender charm of poetry and love.
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills;
Happier of happy though I be, like them
I cannot take possession of the sky,
Mount with a thoughtless impulse, and wheel there
One of a mighty multitude whose way
Is a perpetual harmony and dance
Magnificent.