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.
Life's cares are comforts; such by Heav'n design'd;
He that hath none must make them, or be wretched.
And beauty, for confiding youth,
Those shocks of passion can prepare
That kill the bloom before its time;
And blanch, without the owner's crime,
The most resplendent hair.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way.
And stepping westward seemed to be
A kind of heavenly destiny.
The Eagle, he was lord above,
And Rob was lord below.
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the poet's dream.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee;
And was the safeguard of the west: the worth
Of Venice did not fall below her birth,
Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty.
Lady of the Mere,
Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance.
The grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me.
Oh, be wise, Thou!
Instructed that true knowledge leads to love.
Behold, within the leafy shade,
Those bright blue eggs together laid!
On me the chance-discovered sight
Gleamed like a vision of delight.
Burn all the statutes and their shelves:
They stir us up against our kind;
And worse, against ourselves.
She hath smiles to earth unknown—
Smiles that with motion of their own
Do spread, and sink, and rise.
Thou, while thy babes around thee cling,
Shalt show us how divine a thing
A Woman may be made.
If I should be, where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence, wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; And that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came,
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love, oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Now wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake.
Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows
Like harmony in music; there is a dark
Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles
Discordant elements, makes them cling together
In one society.
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
Stern Daughter of the Voice of God!
Of vast circumference and gloom profound,
This solitary Tree! A living thing
Produced too slowly ever to decay;
Of form and aspect too magnificent
To be destroyed.