"Wordsworth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... connects itself naturally with the growth and development of the province of South Australia, to which I came with my family in the year 1839, before it was quite three years old. But there is much truth in Wordsworth's line, "the child is father of the man," and no less is the mother of the woman; and I must go back to Scotland for the roots of my character and Ideals. I account myself well-born, for My father and my mother loved each other. I consider myself well descended, going back for many ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... acknowledge the propriety of these three great names being honoured in this Abbey Church, even though it be, to use Wordsworth's phrase, already ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... most important English poet of the period between Pope and the illustrious group headed by Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, which arose out of the intellectual ferment of the European Revolution. As a reformer of poetry, who called it back from conventionality to nature, and at the same time as the teacher of a new school of sentiment which acted as a solvent upon the existing moral and ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... their language is tuneful and sweet." Thus the grimy old shoemaker spoke, but I continued: "What about the present-day poets?" Swift came the reply, "We have got none." This was a staggerer, but I suggested: "What about Kipling?" "Too slangy and Coarse!" "Austin?" "Don't ask me." "What of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning?" "Well, Wordsworth is too prosy, you have to read such a lot to get a little; Tennyson is a bit sickly and too sentimental, I mean with washy sentiment; Browning I cannot understand, he is too ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... pavements, but when that morning of annunciation has come to us we know that winter is truly dead, even though his ghost may walk and gibber once or twice. The sweet urge of the new season has rippled up through the oceanic depths of our subconsciousness, and we are aware of the rising tide. Like Mr. Wordsworth we feel that we are wiser than we know. (Perhaps we have misquoted that, ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... for, starting with no other initiation into the mysteries of foreign relations than having had a father born in Wales and having spent his vacations in England, probably in the lake region studying the topography of Wordsworth's poetry,—a certain oft detected resemblance to Wilson must make Wordsworth his favorite poet, as he was Wilson's,—in ten days was he not a great Secretary of State; and in three months the greatest Secretary of State? To be sure, back of him was the strongest nation on the earth, ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... leading idea by no logical process. Keats said that no Poetry was worth [anything] unless it came spontaneously as Leaves to a Tree, etc. {79} I have no faith in your Works of Art done on Theory and Principle, like Wordsworth, Wagner, Holman Hunt, etc. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... lady replied, looking up at him quaintly. "I admire your wish, though not your reservation. I've just been reading those sweet lines of Wordsworth's— ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... the intellectual wrestlings of Kent, Tompkins, Spencer, Elisha Williams, and Abraham Van Vechten, who, as lawyers, were among the chiefest of their time. It is now devoted mainly to the fabrication of steel springs and buckskin gloves. So, like Wordsworth's early star, it has faded into the light of common day. But Johnstown retains one of its ancient splendors—a glory still fresh as at the foundation of the world. Standing on its hills, one looks off upon a country of enameled meadow lands, that melt away southward toward the ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... poetry?—that its action and sentiment, its love and its sorrow, are not heightened by those efforts of the fancy which delight us in dramatic authors?—that its simplicity is bald, and its naturalness rough?—that its excessive familiarity repels taste and disturbs culture? If we may trust Wordsworth, simplicity is not inconsistent with the pleasures of the imagination. The style of the Bible is not redundant,—there is little extravagance in it, and it has no trickery of words. Yet this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... service; these outdone, Disgusted, therefore, or appalled, by aims Of fiercer zealots—so confusion reigned, And the more faithful were compelled to exclaim, As Brutus did to virtue: 'Liberty, I worshipped thee, and find thee but a shade.'" —Wordsworth. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... murder to all of us; and to me, therefore, in particular, has deepened the arduousness of my task. Like AEschylus or Milton in poetry, like Michael Angelo in painting, he has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity; and, as Mr. Wordsworth observes, has in a manner "created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed." To sketch the history of the art, and to examine its principles critically, now remains as a duty for the connoisseur, and for judges of quite another stamp from ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... attention to them. The subject is not without interest and difficulty as an optical one. But the astronomer's object is to get rid of all these flames and sprays of coloured light, so that he has very little sympathy with the admiration which Wordsworth is said to have expressed for out-of-focus views ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... resident, caught a fine conger-eel, weighing fifty-six pounds, which he has presented to the Museum. As Borecambe is a good jumping-off ground for the Lake District there are daily char-a-banc excursions to the land of WORDSWORTH and RUSKIN, each passenger being supplied with a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... Rudyard Kipling, that upon which he has really concentrated, is the only thing worth worrying about in him or in any other man. He has often written bad poetry, like Wordsworth. He has often said silly things, like Plato. He has often given way to mere political hysteria, like Gladstone. But no one can reasonably doubt that he means steadily and sincerely to say something, and the only serious question is, What is that which he has tried to say? ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... honour to a master of arts." He had at the Charter-house formed a friendship, destined to have important bearings on his after history, with Richard Steele, whose character may be summed up in a few sentences. Who has not heard of Sir Richard Steele? Wordsworth says of one ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... struggling youth merged into an easy middle-age, and late years found him in comfortable circumstances, with a solid reputation as an artist, and a solid retiring-allowance from a princely patron, whose house he had served for the better part of his working career. Like Goethe and Wordsworth, he lived out all his life. He was no Marcellus, shown for one brief moment and "withdrawn before his springtime had brought forth the fruits of summer." His great contemporary, Mozart, cut off while yet his light was crescent, is known to posterity only by the products ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... American collection of English poetry, professing in its preface to be a Short Cut to Culture; and he would read with what at that time, it being new to them, seemed to the twins a strange exotic pronunciation, Wordsworth's "Ode to Dooty," and the effect was as if someone should dig a majestic Gregorian psalm in its ribs, and ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... emptiness or absurdities, the outworn platitudes again find their constant lover in Alfred Austin, Tennyson's successor as poet laureate. Austin brought the laureateship, which had been held by poets like Ben Jonson, Dryden, Southey and Wordsworth, to an incredibly low level; he took the thinning stream of garrulous poetic conventionality, reduced it to ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... the exception of the two above alluded to, he ought never to be accused of changing. Some years since, the late Charles Matthews, the comedian, (or rather, as Coleridge used to observe, "the comic poet acting his own poems,") showed me an autograph letter from Mr. Wordsworth to Matthews' brother, (who was at that time educating for the bar) and with whom he corresponded. In this letter he made the following observation, "To-morrow I am going to Bristol to see those two extraordinary young men, Southey ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... so carrying on the eye of the reader as to make him almost lose the consciousness of words,—to make him see every thing flashed, as Wordsworth has grandly ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... have no fear that he could not mould and control and manage her? Oh, no! He imagined her melting, like a moon-beam, into all manner of sweet compliances, becoming an image and reflection of his own better self; and repeated to himself the lines of Wordsworth,— ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... girls sang very nicely, then acted a little play. There were different castes in all the schools, and quite mixed. After this we went to College, where young men are preparing for degrees of the University under Dr. Haug and Mr. Wordsworth; then to the Roman Catholic Orphanage, where 200 girls are assembled, clothed, and fed under a French Lady Superior—dormitory clean and well aired, but many had scrofulous-looking sore eyes; then home to see some friends whom Lady Frere ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... about poets and poetry, you will sometimes find an allusion to the "Lake School." This was the term applied by a writer in the Edinburgh Review to Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge, because they resided in the lake district of Cumberland and Westmoreland, and because—though their works differed in many respects from each other—they sought for inspiration in the simplicity of Nature rather than ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... mental images; either may work with the other's materials; imagination may glorify the tiniest flower; fancy may play around a mountain or a star; the one great distinction between them is that fancy is superficial, while imagination is deep, essential, spiritual. Wordsworth, who was the first clearly to draw the distinction between the fancy and the imagination, states ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... to indicate fully the method by which one would attempt to teach to a group of sixth-grade boys or girls Wordsworth's "Daffodils." The main outline of the method may, however, be indicated as follows: The first thing to be done is to arouse, in so far as is possible, some interest and enthusiasm for the poem in question. One might suggest to the class something of the beauty of the high, rugged ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... Wordsworth, "two living poets, one of whom in the department of fantastic fiction, the other in that of philosophical meditation, have addressed themselves to the same high principles and feelings, and carried forward their ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... the nature of the work which he undertakes, but by the kind of mastery which he shows; not by the breadth of surface over which he toils, but by the perfectness of the result which he attains. Mr. Wordsworth has vindicated the capacity of the sonnet to be a casket of the richest gems of fame. We have no doubt that the song may give evidence of a genius which shall deserve to be ranked with the constructor of an epic. "Scorn not the SONG." ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... older stems. Neither horses nor dogs say to themselves, I suppose, that the sunshine makes them glad, yet both are happier, after the rules of equine and canine existence, on a bright day: neither Helen nor George could have understood a poem of Keats—not to say Wordsworth—(I do not mean they would not have fancied they did)—and yet the soul of nature that dwelt in these common shows did not altogether fail ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... seemed big to you, just as Yarrow seemed big to Wordsworth, and a shilling seems a lot to ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... often, that anything new on the subject might be considered superfluous, were it not that the very fact of the discussion is in itself a curiosity worthy of attention. The note in dispute was heard with equal distinctness by Homer and Wordsworth; and indeed there are few poets of any age or country who have not, at one time or other in their lives, had the testimony of their own ears as to its character. Whence, then, this difference of opinion? ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... on with Gibbon, so wait your return to recommence the readings. I dislike the sneering essence of his writings. I keep referring to his face, until the dislike seems to become personal. How different is it with Wordsworth! And yet I cannot escape from the thought that he is always solemnly thinking of himself (but I do reverence him). But this is curious; Byron was a greater egoist, and yet I do not feel the same with him. He reminds me of a beast of the desert, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... one day, and read it sitting on the sun-drenched stoop of one of the old houses whose eyeless stare and boarded windows bespoke one absent family. Off this same stall she also purchased a volume of Wordsworth's poems, feeling a vague, a procreative, and who shall say mistaken need for beauty. Over and over she read, milking each ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... wonder and in perturbation, and the moment he disappeared they grew ashamed of their emotion and angry with its cause, and began to hearken to other and more melodious voices—to Shelley and Keats, to Wordsworth and Coleridge and the 'faultless and fervent melodies of Tennyson.' In course of time Byron was forgotten, or only remembered with disdain; and when Thackeray, the representative Briton, the artist Philistine, ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... neighbour. The widow that gives her mite to the treasury, the poor man that brings to the thirsty a cup of cold water, perform their acts of charity, though they may be of comparatively little moment. Wordsworth, in a poetic gem, ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... to Lynton, too, that Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and Coleridge, came on a visit, and were so ravished by the beauty of the place that they were nearly decided to settle here, and might have founded a school of Devon poets instead of Lake poets. It was at Lynton, also, that "The Ancient Mariner" was ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... purely spiritual is a power which clothes itself spontaneously and of right in all the majesty and omnipotence of nature. It is the same truth, again, in another aspect of it, which is expressed in Wordsworth's sublime lines to Duty: ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... ability in which Shelley has no equal among English poets. But in each case he redeems these defects with, as it seems to me, far more than counterbalancing merits. He is never prosaic as Milton, like his great successor Wordsworth, constantly is, and his very faults are the faults of a poet. He never (as Shelley does constantly) dissolves away into a flux of words which simply bids good-bye to sense or meaning, and wanders on at large, unguided, without an end, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... portraying the soul-life of the poet. By the flowers which he sets forth to seek, we are to understand the songs which he desires to compose. He asks himself where the poetic inspiration is to be sought, and the answer is the same as was given by Wordsworth, that it is to the grand and beautiful scenes of Nature that the poet must turn for the elevation of soul which will lift him to the sublimest heights of his art. But this exaltation bears with it the heavy penalty ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... and sublime. "In reading 'Paradise Lost,'" says Mr Lowell, "one has a feeling of spaciousness such as no other poet gives." Paradise Regained is, in fact, the story of the Temptation, and of Christ's triumph over the wiles of Satan. Wordsworth says: "'Paradise Regained' is most perfect in execution of any written by Milton;" and Coleridge remarks that "it is in its kind the most perfect poem extant, though its kind may be inferior in interest." Samson Agonistes ("Samson in Struggle") is a drama, in highly ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... any ancient observer. Neither Homer nor Virgil, neither Aristophanes nor Horace, acknowledge any such clouds among those compelled by Jove. Chaucer has no word of them, nor Dante;[1] Milton none, nor Thomson. In modern times, Scott, Wordsworth and Byron are alike unconscious of them; and the most observant and descriptive of scientific men, De Saussure, is utterly silent concerning them. Taking up the traditions of air from the year before Scott's death, ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... every house, as long as it is new, is a standing defiance to the landscape. In color, texture, and form, it disconnects itself and resists assimilation to its surroundings. The "gentle incorporation into the scenery of Nature," that Wordsworth demands, is the most difficult point to effect, as well as the most needful. This makes the importance of a background of trees, of shrubs, and creepers, and the uniting lines of sheds, piazzas, etc., mediating and easing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... time. The real quality of this comedy is in its personages and in the theory upon which they are conceived. Ben Jonson had theories about poetry and the drama, and he was neither chary in talking of them nor in experimenting with them in his plays. This makes Jonson, like Dryden in his time, and Wordsworth much later, an author to reckon with; particularly when we remember that many of Jonson's notions came for a time definitely to prevail and to modify the whole trend of English poetry. First of all Jonson was a classicist, that is, he believed in restraint and precedent in art in opposition ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... Suspicion of republican principles—which, it seemed, led straight to the Terror—frightened many good men, who would otherwise have been reformers, into supporting the triumph of coercion and Toryism. The elder generation of poets had been republicans in their youth. Wordsworth had said of the Revolution that it was "bliss to be alive" in that dawn; Southey and Coleridge had even planned to found a communistic society in the New World. Now all three were rallied to the defence of order and property, to Church and Throne and Constitution. From their seclusion in ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... Rome' and his two other fine ballads were still in the freshness of their fame. Lockhart's 'Spanish Ballads' were as familiar in the drawing-room as in the study. Tennyson and Mrs. Browning were opening up new veins of poetry. These, with Wordsworth, Moore, Uhland, and others of minor note, lay ready to our hands,—as Scott, Byron, Crabbe, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey had done to James and Horace Smith in 1812, when writing the 'Rejected Addresses.' Never, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... of rodomontade in him about the charms of the country, from beginning to end; if there were, we should despise him. He can find nothing to say of Skiddaw but that he is "a great creature"; and he writes to Wordsworth, (whose sight is failing,) on Ambleside, "I return you condolence for your decaying sight,—not for anything there is to see in the country, but for the miss of the pleasure of reading ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... school-book in England, and who was imitated by a writer who passed for a poet in the time of Henry VIII., Alexander Barclay. In the hands of the Sicilians, pastoral poetry may have been an attempt at idealizing country life almost as genuine as some of Wordsworth's poems; but it soon ceased to be that, and in Alexandrian hands it took its place among the recognized departments of classic and literary copying, in which Virgil found and used it. But a further step had been made since Virgil had adopted it as an instrument of his genius. In the ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... lyric poets the cuckoo is "companion of the spring," "darling of the spring;" coming with the daisy, and the primrose, and the blossoming sweet-pea. Where the sound came from I could not tell; it puzzled Wordsworth, with younger eyes than mine, to find ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the nightingale's song is so beautiful; I am ashamed to own it, but I do not like it. It does not use the diatonic scale. A bird should either make no attempt to sing in tune, or it should succeed in doing so. Larks are Wordsworth, and as for canaries, I would almost sooner hear a pig having its nose ringed, or the grinding of an axe. Cuckoos are all right; they sing in tune. Rooks are lovely; they do not pretend to tune. Seagulls again, and ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... geology, agricultural chemistry, and political economy, and of his intelligent appreciation of the lessons taught by history. Nor was he insensible to the charms of art, especially those of poetry. His favourite authors among the poets seem to have been Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Wordsworth, and Cowper. His knowledge of the customs and modes of thought of the natives of India, rarely equalled and never surpassed, was more than half the secret of his notable success as an administrator. The greatest achievement of his busy and unselfish life was the suppression of the system of organized ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... a fine poem here about "seven lovely Campbells" whose father's name was Archibald; it must mean us,—don't you think so?' And a very pretty boy about ten years of age, who had been poring for some time over Wordsworth's Poems, lifted his roguish face to his mother's with ...
— Holiday Tales • Florence Wilford
... the plain fact is that the poet is simply a person who is still in possession of all his early qualities. Wordsworth gave away the secret. He is a boy who ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... study of the ballads, that they were mainly regarded from the literary point of view. The influence of their artless melody and straightforward diction may be felt in the lyrics of Goethe and of Coleridge, of Wordsworth, of Heine and of Andre Chenier. Chenier, in the most affected age even of French poetry, translated some of the Romaic ballads; one, as it chanced, being almost identical with that which Shakespeare borrowed from some English reciter, and put into ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... North Wind Romney Marsh Axmouth The Preacher and the Sea Conversion July A Sunday morning in November Under Beachy Head: December 24th December Dreaming Ourselves The Riddle An Epoch Belief Extracts from a diary on the Quantocks Godwin and Wordsworth ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... but regarded them merely as food. It pleases me to think of the hermit sitting under the walls of his church or by his cell writing the poem which has given me so much pleasure, including in it all the little lives that cams to visit him—the birds and the beasts—enumerating them as carefully as Wordsworth would, and loving them as tenderly. Marban! Could one find a more beautiful name for a hermit? Guaire is the brother's name. Marban and King Guaire. Now, imagine the two brothers meeting for a poetic disputation regarding the value of life, and each speaking ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... in honour of the lighthouse-maiden were written and sung, some of which we shall give in these pages. Among the rest was the following, which both Grace and her father highly esteemed, as it was from the pen of Wordsworth:— ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... death (1770) gave birth to Wordsworth. The freer and nobler natural school of poetry came to supplant the artificial one, belonging to an epoch of wigs and false calves, and to open toward the far greater one of the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... to believe that it would be advantageous that the selection of a successor to Dr. Wordsworth should be made from members of Trinity College who are or have been fellows of the College. Of these, the most eminent in respect to the qualifications required in the office of Master, and to academical ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... a herb from which puddings were made. Hence any pudding of the kind. Selden ("Table Talk") says: "Our tansies at Easter have reference to the bitter herbs." See in Wordsworth's "University Life in the Eighteenth Century" recipes for "an apple tansey," "a bean tansey," and ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... unevadible patent for it. Of dramatic blank verse we have many and various specimens;—for example, Shakspeare's as compared with Massinger's, both excellent in their kind:—of lyric, and of what may be called Orphic, or philosophic, blank verse, perfect models may be found in Wordsworth: of colloquial blank verse there are excellent, though not perfect, examples in Cowper;—but of epic blank verse, since Milton, ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... which was so common in that day, and which is to be seen at its perfection in the English edition of Jacob Behmen. The frontispiece is a full-length likeness of the author of the Holy War, with his whole soul laid open and his hidden heart 'anatomised.' Why, asked Wordsworth, and Matthew Arnold in our day has echoed the question—why does Homer still so live and rule without a rival in the world of letters? And they answer that it is because he always sang with his eye so fixed upon its object. 'Homer, to thee I turn.' And so it was with Dante. And so ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... true, died by accident, and Chatterton by poison, but suicide is in itself a sign of a morbid state. It is true that Rogers lived to be almost a centenarian, but he was banker first and poet afterwards. Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning have all raised the average age of the poets, but for some reason the novelists, especially of late years, have a deplorable record. They will end by being scheduled with ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... still and out of date.... I can't think of it without thinking of Wordsworth, and I don't want to think of Wordsworth.... Being with you makes me want to get on into the future, and there's something ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... rare and useful, but unedifying variation, an energetic genius born without the prejudices or superstitions of his contemporaries. The resultant unscrupulous freedom of thought made Byron a greater poet than Wordsworth just as it made Peter a greater king than George III; but as it was, after all, only a negative qualification, it did not prevent Peter from being an appalling blackguard and an arrant poltroon, nor did it enable Byron to become a religious force like Shelley. Let us, then, leave Byron's ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... unity characteristic only of the Divina Commedia. All the works of Dante, with the possible exception of the De vulgari Eloquio (which is unfinished), are component parts of a Whole Duty of Man mutually completing and interpreting one another. They are also, as truly as Wordsworth's "Prelude," a history of the growth of a poet's mind. Like the English poet he valued himself at a high rate, the higher no doubt after Fortune had made him outwardly cheap. Sempre il magnanimo si magnifica in suo cuore; e cosi lo pusillanimo per contrario ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... not read them at all; you practically decide that it is enough to possess them, and that the mere possession of them gives you a *cachet*. The truth is, you are a sham. And your soul is a sea of uneasy remorse. You reflect: "According to what Matthew Arnold says, I ought to be perfectly mad about Wordsworth's *Prelude*. And I am not. Why am I not? Have I got to be learned, to undertake a vast course of study, in order to be perfectly mad about Wordsworth's *Prelude*? Or am I born without the faculty of pure taste in literature, despite my vague longings? I do wish I could smack my lips over ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... behind the 'number' of the numberless stars works the infinite will of God. Surely an intelligible creation must have an intelligent source. Surely a universe in which Mind can apprehend order and number must have a Mind at the back of it. Wordsworth has nobly said of Duty what we may more truly say of God: 'Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, And the most ancient heavens through Thee are fresh and strong.' 'For that He is great in might, not one faileth.' Scripture bids us think of God, not as a creative ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... not to the exclusion of the latter, for character is best formed by action. But all her studies, occupations, even her pastimes, should be pursued with the main purpose of making herself the ideal woman, such an one as Wordsworth describes, ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... his style, his manner or movement: to summarize what Mathew Arnold says of it (the best I can do): it is as direct and rapid as Scott's; as lucid as Wordsworth's could be; but noble like Shakespeare's or Milton's. There is no Dantesque periphrasis, nor Miltonian agnostic struggle and inversion; but he calls spades, spades, and moves on to the next thing swiftly, clearly, and yet with exultation. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Phocion, Demosthenes with Cicero, Brutus with Dion—the Dion whose history inspired the poem of Wordsworth. Greek republicanism, too, had its fatal hour; but we do not pour scorn and contumely on those who strove to prolong the life of Athens beyond the term assigned by fate. The case of Athens, a single independent state, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... Dictionary of Christian Biography (especially those by Lightfoot, Reynolds, and Wordsworth), and in Herzog's Realencyclopaedie ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... poets he loved Wordsworth, the revelation of whose richness and glory only came to him after he was seventeen. There were no bounds to his admiration for the Wordsworth sonnets. Many a time since the War he would recite the glorious sonnet ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... 'at I cam' upo' the ither day in a buik 'at Maister Graham gied me afore he gaed awa—'cause I reckon he kent them a' by hert. They say jist sic like's ye been sayin', mem—gien I cud but min' upo' them. They're aboot a man 'at aye does the richt gait—made by ane they ca' Wordsworth." ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... may have been the first American to look through an immersion lens with the famous Modena professor. Mr. Emerson says that his narrow and desultory reading had inspired him with the wish to see the faces of three or four writers, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey, Carlyle. His accounts of his interviews with these distinguished persons are too condensed to admit of further abbreviation. Goethe and Scott, whom he would have liked to look upon, were dead; Wellington he saw at Westminster Abbey, at the funeral ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... rate the London that Dickens knew clung somewhat to Wordsworth's happy description written but ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... capital at the beginning of the century,—Sydney Smith, Lord Jeffrey, Christopher North, Macaulay, Mackintosh, De Quincey, Brougham,—all these, with scarcely an exception, have lived far beyond the average of human life. So was it with the great poets and romancers of that period. Wordsworth, living the life of a recluse near the beautiful lakes of Westmoreland, lasted to fourscore. Southey, after a life of unparalleled literary industry, broke down at sixty-six. Coleridge, with habits which ought to have destroyed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... in the middle years of the last century, when the same revival of nature-worship was inspiring painters in France as had, fifty years earlier, flushed Wordsworth's poetry, and such famous and more fortunate contemporaries of Leon Bonvin as Corot and Rousseau and Millet and Daubigny and Jacque and Dupre were painting in the forest of Fontainebleau. Theirs to succeed; poor Leon found life too hard, ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... own idea; I bagged it from Coleridge. P'raps you'll say he muddled himself with opium till he couldn't tell which was Nature and which was Coleridge; but there was old Wordsworth, as sober as a churchwarden, and he knew. What you call my Cockney view is the view of the modern poets. They don't—they can't distinguish between Nature and the human soul. Talk of getting near to Nature—we wouldn't know Nature if we saw it now. Those everlasting poets ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... passionless poetry,—if poetry, which, by the definition of its highest authority, is "simple, sensuous, passionate," can ever be unimpassioned,—that he was the oracle of feminine taste while he lived, and at his death bequeathed a fame yet dear to the school of Southey and Wordsworth. Daniel was no otherwise Laureate than his position in the queen's household may authorize that title. If ever so entitled by contemporaries, it was quite in a Pickwickian and complimentary sense. His retreat from the busy vanity of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... corresponds with the order of the Gospels as we have them. Durandus would probably furnish some information. The fabulous legend of the lion savours of a later origin. Some valuable remarks on the subject, and a list of references to early writers, will be found in Dr. Wordsworth's Lectures on the Canon of Scripture (Lect. VI. p. 151.), and his Lectures on the Apocalypse ...
— Notes & Queries No. 29, Saturday, May 18, 1850 • Various
... Napoleon won victories because they were great men is to invert the order of nature and of truth. They are recognised as great men because of the mastery of their business which they manifested in action. That mastery was due primarily to knowledge. Wordsworth hit the mark when, in answer to the question "Who is the Happy Warrior?" he replied that ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... optimists. The name of liberty was honoured in that family, its spirit also, but within stringent limits; and some of the foreign friends of Mrs. Jenkin were, as I have said, men distinguished on the Liberal side. Like Wordsworth, ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his rosy cheeks Angelical, keen eye, courageous look, And conscious step of purity and pride." Wordsworth's Prelude. ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... my right, was the tower of the little church, whitish against the woods, and close beside it, amid the trees, I felt the presence of Wordsworth's house, though ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 18. The reader may, perhaps, call to mind the beautiful sonnet of William Wordsworth, addressed to Toussaint L'Ouverture, during ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... think of a parallel (ain't it a high lark? As that Countess would say)—there are few men believe it was I wrote the Ode to a Skylark. And it often has given myself and Lord Albert no end of diversion To hear fellows maintain to my face it was Wordsworth who wrote the Excursion, When they know that whole reams of the verses recur in my authorized works Here and there, up and down! Why, such readers are infidels—heretics— Turks. And the pitiful critics who think in their paltry presumption to pay me a Pretty compliment, pairing me off, sir, ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... William Wordsworth, who lived at Rydal Mount; also called "Poet of the Excursion," from his principal ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... Inscription for a Seat,' &c. (p. 349), was first published in the Morning Post, on October 21, 1800, Coleridge's twenty-eighth birthday. It remains an open question whether it was written by Coleridge or by Wordsworth. Both were contributors to the Morning Post. Both wrote 'Inscriptions'. Both had a hand in making the 'seat'. Neither claimed or republished the poem. It favours or, rather, parodies the style and sentiments now of one and now of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... dew-drop which the morn brings forth, Ill fitted to sustain unkindly shocks, Or to be trailed along the soiling earth. WORDSWORTH. ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... rise! No end of a fine show. Long bit of poetry about it in the guide-book, cribbed from Wordsworth or somebody. Can't say the page, as I tore out the leaf last night to put inside my boot, to help to keep my toes warm. Never expected to see the sun rise from the highest spot in England. Awful good score for me, though—very few do it, I fancy. ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... later years Was with me when a Boy She gave me eyes, she gave me ears, And love, and thought, and joy." Wordsworth. ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... judge of Michael Angelo's attainments as a poet, even without having recourse to the original Italian, by Wordsworth's translations of some of the Italian master's sonnets, and by Mr John Edward Taylor's translations of selections ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... offer my thanks to the Rev. John Wordsworth, late Fellow of Brasenose College, for his patient perusal of these sheets as they have passed through the press, and for favouring me with several judicious suggestions. To him may be applied the saying of President ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... public hours of idleness spent among congenial spirits. We can fancy him, the patriarch of living poets, seated as a guest at the breakfast-table of Samuel Rogers, who is about twelve years his junior, and those fine lads, Lisle Bowles, James Montgomery, and William Wordsworth, and those promising children, Tom Moore and Tom Campbell, and that braw chiel John Wilson—(palmam qui meruit ferat)—the youngest of the party something, perhaps, but not much, under seventy, except the bard of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... not—rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been, must ever be. In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering! In the faith that looks through death— In years, that bring the philosophic mind. WORDSWORTH. ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... we find related the affront which led to Hogg's caricature of Wordsworth's style, an offence which shut out the Shepherd from the society of the amiable poet of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various
... intellectual side, we are told that Holland's love of literature was already marked. "I can remember reading Wordsworth with him, and Carlyle, and Clough; and, after Sunday breakfasts, Boswell's Life of Johnson." Then, as always, he found a great part of his ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... Poetry, 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' according to Wordsworth, the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science'—that poetry irrespective of rhyme and metrical arrangement which is as immortal as the heart of man, is distinctive in Mr. Allen's work from the first written page. Like Minerva issuing full-formed from the head ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel, or oration that our press vents in the last few years, which goes to the same tune. We have a great many flutes and flageolets, but not often the sound of any fife. Yet, Wordsworth's "Laodamia," and the ode of "Dion," and some sonnets, have a certain noble music; and Scott will sometimes draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord Evandale given by Balfour of Burley. Thomas Carlyle, with his natural taste for what is manly and daring in character, has suffered no heroic trait ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... I used to find in Wordsworth's poetry and in the work of our own Whittier. I never read them now, but years ago I did a little. You were country-born yourself, as I remember. Don't you recall how your imagination made rich with meaning the simple pleasures ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... Sedgwick, our sympathies for our fellow creatures take a more humane range. We are moved by an impulse to do good—to relieve the suffering—to regulate our own action in regard to others by a higher and better rule. You are a reader of the poets, too—and like myself, I believe, are an admirer of Wordsworth's calm and deep sympathy with the better and ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... Wordsworth's 'Prelude,' and, accordingly, despatch it by this post; the other little volume shall follow in a day or two. I shall be glad to hear from you whenever you have time to write to me, but you are never, on any account, to do this ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... of the marshes at each end of the plain, in the time of year when the battle was fought, has been adverted to by Wordsworth,[50] and this would hinder the Persian general from arranging and employing his horsemen on his extreme wings, while it also enabled the Greeks, as they came forward, to occupy the whole breadth of the practicable ground with an unbroken line of leveled spears, against which, if any Persian horse ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... But our British system of education does not proceed on the assumption that its pupils are destined to "live under" any one. Our ideal is that of the free man, trained in the exercise of his powers and in the command and control of his faculties, who, like Wordsworth's "Happy Warrior" (a poem which embodies the best British ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... Virgil and Wordsworth in our tent, with new pleasure there, while, waiting for a clearer atmosphere, nor did the weather prevent our appreciating the simple truth ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... us, and John Keats, and Wordsworth—and our Sunday evenings were of a happiness to be remembered forever; at least they were so ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... a pastoral and Biblical dream: that a child was the most innocent and the wisest of us all. Wordsworth hailed him as "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" And in the next generation Victorian novelists took that dream seriously enough to make children the heroes and heroines of their most searching fictions. There had been no "children's ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare |
