"Wordsworth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a future life (post-existence), but also in pre-existence; teaching that the ideas of reason, or our intuitions, are reminiscences of a past experience. [Footnote: In the following lines from Wordsworth we catch a glimpse of Plato's doctrine of pre-existence:— "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... dachtylos changed to daktylos 33 resiliance changed to resilience Ads p. 6 Wordsworth ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... 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 nobler principles ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... in movement one and all, But of the portion which attacked by water, Thicker than leaves the lives began to fall,[416] Though led by Arseniew, that great son of slaughter, As brave as ever faced both bomb and ball. "Carnage" (so Wordsworth tells you) "is God's daughter:"[417] If he speak truth, she is Christ's sister, and Just now behaved ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... article on the growing extension of the English language throughout the world (Macmillan's Magazine, March, 1892) we read: "English is practically certain to become the language of the world.... The speech of Shakespeare and Milton, of Dryden and Swift, of Byron and Wordsworth, will be, in a sense in which no other language has been, the speech of the whole world." We do not nowadays ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... "Well, that means that I'm not the only one. Wordsworth evidently got worried about things like I do. But it's the cruelty—that's what ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... we have been supposing as to the engine is just what many men have done. Poe wrote "The Raven"; he was working then up to two thousand horse power. But he wrote abundance of poor stuff, working at about twenty-five. Read straight through the volumes of Wordsworth, and I think you will find traces of the engine having worked at many different powers, varying from twenty-five horses or less up two thousand or more. Go and hear a really great preacher, when he is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... remember how I revelled in the back numbers of the Edinburgh Review, though even then I could not but feel the injustice which it did to what it called the Lake school of poets, and more especially to Coleridge and Wordsworth. Shakespeare also was almost a sealed book, and perhaps we had a little too much of religious reading, such as Doddridge's 'Rise and Progress,' or Baxter's 'Saint's Rest,' or Alleine's 'Call to the Unconverted,' or Fleetwood's 'Life of Christ'—excellent books in ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... 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
... raise a harmless laugh, were our main objects; in the attainment of which united aims, we were sometimes hurried into extravagance, by attaching much more importance to the last than to the two first. In no instance were we thus betrayed into a greater injustice than in the case of Mr. Wordsworth—the touching sentiment, profound wisdom, and copious harmony of whose loftier writings we left unnoticed, in the desire of burlesquing them; while we pounced upon his popular ballads, and exerted ourselves ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... page 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
... unquestionably, next to Erasmus, the most brilliant scholar of his age: while the precious biographical memoirs of him, which have luckily descended to us, place his character, in a domestic point of view, beyond that of all his contemporaries. Dr. Wordsworth[297] has well spoken of "the heavenly mindedness" of More: but how are bibliomaniacs justly to appreciate the classical lore, and incessantly-active book-pursuits,[298] of this scholar and martyr! How he soared "above his compeers!" How richly, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... accomplishments, charmed him. The one appeared to him the perfection of elegant art, the other of graceful nature. When he looked at Maggie, and thought of the moorland home from which she had never wandered, the mysteriously beautiful lines of Wordsworth seemed to ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... you happen to remember Wordsworth's "Boy of Windermere"? This boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud, mimicking the hooting of the owls, who ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... 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 ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... be remembered as the earliest romantic novel in France and the greatest and most dramatic picture of Richelieu now extant. De Vigny was a convinced Anglophile, well acquainted with the writings of Shakespeare and Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, and Leopardi. He also married an ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... celebrated men who lived there, as by the beauty of its scenery, and the cheapness of its accommodation. He had long entertained an admiration for Southey's poetry, and was now beginning to study Wordsworth and Coleridge. But if he hoped for much companionship with the literary lions of the lakes, he was disappointed. Coleridge was absent, and missed making his acquaintance—a circumstance he afterwards regretted, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... 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
... the orators of antiquity; Gibbon wrote a history which such men as Guizot and Milman pronounced wonderful both for art and learning; Hume, Reid, and Stewart, carried metaphysical inquiry to its utmost depth; Gray, Burns, Goldsmith, Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth, were not unworthy successors of Dryden and Pope; Adam Smith called into existence the science of political economy, and nearly brought it to perfection in a single lifetime; Reynolds and West adorned the galleries with pictures which ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... apparent even to the most superficial readers. By the time we have read and extracted all the sweets from three or four of these, we shall be prepared to go a step farther and undertake the study of Wordsworth's immortal productions,—productions but little more difficult and but little less poetic. Thus, step by step, we may review the six centuries of English poetry which lie behind, and when at last we reach ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... as large as our robin and rather showily dressed, with a loud, strident voice, I had seen and heard everywhere both in town and country, but he was a stranger and did not appeal to me. But the thought of the skylark brought Shelley and Wordsworth, and English downs and meadows, near to me at once, and I was eager to hear it. So early one morning we left the Pleasanton, our tarrying-place, and climbed the long, pastoral slope above the city, where cattle ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... special patroness of the chase and other sylvan sports. Her favorite haunts were groves and lakes, and she blessed the increase of field and meadow. She was mistress of the brute creation, and showed special favor to the bear, the boar, the dog, the goat, and the hind. The poet Wordsworth has described how the ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... at once in the major, allegro, and wrought into most beautiful and expressive strains, each one growing out of the last (if I may once again use Wordsworth's magnificent word) "inevitably"; it ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... makes his own clothing, teaches his goats to dance, and wrestles in thought with the problems suggested by his Bible. Another example of the same temper may be seen in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and yet another in Wordsworth's Prelude. There is no danger that English thought will ever underestimate the value and meaning of the individual soul. The greatest English literature, it might almost be said, from Shakespeare's Hamlet ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... in Paris, but sought out Carlyle, then hardly recognized, and living in the lonely hills of the Scottish Border. There began a friendship which had great influence on the lives of both men, and lasted through life. He also visited Wordsworth. But the new life before him called ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Braminical Wordsworth. Now it will be remembered that Wordsworth, in that glorious ode whence we extract the above, develops the Platonic idea (shall we call Platonic that which has been entertained by the wise and the feeling of all times?) of a shadowy recollection of past and eternal existence in the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... ever such a race since 1829, When WORDSWORTH, SELWYN, MERIVALE began the mighty line, First of the stalwart heroes who matched their straining thews, And on great Thames's tide have fought the battle of the Blues? Who writes of pampered softness? Confusion on his pen: Still is there pluck in England, and still ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 28, 1891 • Various
... a straitened condition as that he may not, on certain occasions, assist his 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
... yet, e'en there, the canvas glow'd With triumphs, a yet ampler brood, Of Raphael and his brotherhood. And nobly perfect, in our day Of haste, half-work, and disarray, Profound yet touching, sweet yet strong, Hath risen Goethe's, Wordsworth's song; Yet even I (and none will bow Deeper to these) must needs allow, They yield us not, to soothe our pains, Such multitude of heavenly strains As from the kings of sound are blown, Mozart, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... boy—no better—with his rosy cheeks Angelical, keen eye, courageous look, And conscious step of purity and pride." Wordsworth's Prelude. ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... solitary and formidable class, whom she was enjoined by her parents to "remember all your life." By these means, and from hearing constant talk of great men and their works, her earliest conceptions of the world included an august circle of beings to whom she gave the names of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, and so on, who were, for some reason, much more nearly akin to the Hilberys than to other people. They made a kind of boundary to her vision of life, and played a considerable part in determining her scale of good and bad ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... has been so eminently unchristian as to interfere, or whether the authorities have removed the book in ignorance of the steady demand which there has been for it on the part of at least one reader, are points I cannot determine. All I know is that the book is gone, and I feel as Wordsworth is generally supposed to have felt when he became aware that Lucy was in her grave, and exclaimed so emphatically that this would make a considerable difference to him, or ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... See Wordsworth's verses, "written at Calais the 15th Aug. 1802," in which the indifference of the people is contrasted with their enthusiasm in the early days ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... gentleman, who loved poetry well enough for its own sake, told me that he had obtained a more correct and more satisfying idea of the Lake district from an eighteenpenny book of photographic views than from all the works of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth put together. I also remember his saying concerning this subject of scenery in literature, that he would thank an author as much for writing an eloquent description of what he had just had for dinner. But this was in reference to another argument; namely, the proper province ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... Sec. 16 [Greek: exelthe [peristera kai] plethos haimatos]. It is unnecessary for my purpose to inquire whether the words [Greek: peristera kai] should be altered into [Greek: peri sturaka] according to Bishop Wordsworth's ingenious emendation, or omitted altogether as in the text ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... irritation, and most old people can probably say that they have seen promising intellects frittered away; minds above the average at the outset of life rendered incurably desultory, shallow, and conceited. If there are readers of Wordsworth who are puzzled at this day about the drift of his poem, called "Anecdote for Fathers, Showing how the Practice of Lying May be Taught," let them remember that it was written at a time when "the Pestalozzian system" was ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... [Footnote 112: See Wordsworth's beautiful inscription—"For the spot where the hermitage stood on St. Herbert's island, Derwentwater."—Ed. of 1858, ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... flower growing wild. Read Lowell's "Dandelion," "Violet, Sweet Violet," Wordsworth's "Daisy," "The Daffodils," "The Small Celandine," and Burns's "Daisy." These do not so much describe as they arouse a feeling of love for the flowers which will show itself in ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... Rydal Mount, William Wordsworth, who lived at Rydal Mount; also called "Poet of the Excursion," from ...
— 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.
... according as it meets the requirements. Then a Titan emerges who defies the canons, wrecks the old order, and in his own way, to the despair or scorn of his contemporaries, creates a work which the generation that follows comes to see is beautiful. "Every author," says Wordsworth, "as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed." Wordsworth in his own generation was ridiculed; Millet, when he ceased painting nudes for art-dealers' windows and ventured to express himself, faced starvation. Every ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... football ground at Ripton was at the edge of the school fields, separated from the road by narrow iron railings; and along these railings the choicest spirits of the town would line up, and smoke and yell, and spit and yell again. As Wordsworth wrote, "There are two voices". They were on something ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... of American letters, indeed, may be said to have been begun when William Cullen Bryant published "Thanatopsis," in the year 1816. Our writers then began to feel the influence of the vigorous schools of English poetry of which Byron, Wordsworth, and Coleridge were the shining lights. Like these, our own writers shook off the poetic dominion of Pope, and declared form to be subordinate to the thought and the feeling. Bryant, the enthusiastic disciple of Wordsworth, set the bold example, and from that moment American ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... been a reviewer. In 1807, in a Magazine called "Monthly Literary Recreations," I reviewed Wordsworth's trash of that time. In the Monthly Review I wrote some articles which were inserted. This was in the latter part ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... suffered; and, had they been more fitly named, the one might have been Lord Protector, and the other have shared the laurels with Isaiah. In this matter we must not forget that all our great poets have borne great names. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley—what a constellation of lordly words! Not a single common-place name among them—not a Brown, not a Jones, not a Robinson; they are all names that one would stop and look at on a door-plate. Now, imagine if Pepys had tried to clamber somehow into the enclosure ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... vanity, petulance, and even error should flit across the surface and be forgotten. Whatever else Dryden may have been, the last and abiding impression of him is that he was thoroughly manly; and while it may be disputed whether he was a great poet, it may be said of him, as Wordsworth said of Burke, "that he was by far the greatest man of his age, not only abounding in knowledge himself, but feeding, in various ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... said Priscilla, "and I don't see any reason why he shouldn't—anyhow it's jolly good sport to pretend—and if he is, it's our plain duty to hunt him down at any risk. Sylvia Courtney says that Wordsworth's 'Ode to Duty' is quite the most thrillingly impressive poem in the whole 'Golden Treasury' so you won't want to go back ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... 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
... the sincere and independent human mind is found in the great writers of all periods, and is called the Return to Nature. It is seen in Pope no less than in Wordsworth; in The Rape of the Lock no less than in Peter Bell. Indeed the whole history of the mock-heroic, and the work of Tassoni, Boileau, and Pope, the three chief masters in that kind, was a reassertion of sincerity and nature against the stilted conventions of the late literary epic. The Iliad ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... surrounded by his servants. Strong womanly instincts were astir within her, and they were not all wise folk who had been drawn around her by her generous enthusiasm for the new hopes of the world, that made it then, as Wordsworth felt, a ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... so 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 holding us ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... lyrical. But though the idea from which many novels start was perhaps the proper germ for one or more lyrics, it never attains in romance a pure and unincumbered development. We may illustrate the different intellectual creations founded on a common conception by imagining how one of Wordsworth's lyrical fancies might have been developed in three volumes of romance instead of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... times, compared with the elder essayists. Nevertheless, Leigh Hunt's roses always bloom, his breezes are always "redolent of joy and youth," and his sunny spirit pervades even a rainy day. Chaucer and Keats never yet have found a more delicate or discriminating critic; and his paper on Wordsworth, beside the fine touches, has solider qualities that command one's admiration. The personal memorials of the author's literary friends have a peculiar charm to us in this land and generation, for whom Hazlitt and Keats are names almost as shadowy and romantic as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... declares it one Lion, equal to "twaindy" bronze Crosses. Unless the ratio of metals is very different here, this latter must be a token coin, and therefore legal tender for but a small amount. (That would be pain and pleasure to Mr. Wordsworth Donisthorpe if he were to chance to join us, for once he planned a Utopian coinage, [Footnote: A System of Measures, by Wordsworth Donisthorpe.] and the words Lion and Cross are his. But a token coinage and "legal tender" he cannot abide. They make ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... lived in as "critical, didactic, paradoxical, romantic."[1] It was the age of the Edinburgh Review, of the Utilitarians, of Godwin and Shelley, of Wordsworth and Byron—in a word of the French Revolution and all that it brought in its train. Poetry in this age was impregnated with politics; ideas for social reform sprang from the ground of personal sentiment. Hazlitt was born early enough to partake ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... On Monday last Mr. Silas Pargeter, an old 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 megaphone ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... great joy to me that you like the Wordsworth bits; there are worse coming; but I've been put into a dreadful passion by two of my cleverest girl pupils "going off pious!" It's exactly like a nice pear getting "sleepy;" and I'm pretty nearly in the worst temper I can be in, for W. W. But what are these ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... objects and occasions of joy which Lamb found laid out before him, at the world's feast, books were certainly one of the most precious, and after books came pictures. 'What any man can write, surely I may read!' he says to Wordsworth, of Caryl on Job, six folios. 'I like books about books,' he confesses, the test of the book-lover. 'I love,' he says, 'to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... homeward. We were to have passed a week on our return amidst the lakes, and I protested against going back to London without one look at least. So we stopped at Kendal on Saturday, took a little carriage over to Windermere and Ambleside and passed the whole evening with the poet and Mrs. Wordsworth, at their own exquisite home on Rydal Mount. At ten o'clock we went from there to Miss Martineau, who has built the prettiest of houses in this valley near to Mrs. Arnold at Fox Howe. As we had only one day we made an arrangement with Miss Martineau ...
— Letters from England 1846-1849 • Elizabeth Davis Bancroft (Mrs. George Bancroft)
... soon as possible, the cost of paper and printing. I will then send the necessary remittance, together with the manuscript. I should like it to be printed in one octavo volume, of the same quality of paper and size of type as Moxon's last edition of Wordsworth. The poems will occupy, I should think, from 200 to 250 pages. They are not the production of a clergyman, nor are they exclusively of a religious character; but I presume these circumstances will be immaterial. It will, perhaps, be necessary that you should see the manuscript, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... now great in proportion. Hence the imagination, which delights in nothing more than the enhancing of the characters of repose, effects this usually by either attributing to things visibly energetic an ideal stability, or to things visibly stable an ideal activity or vitality. Hence Wordsworth, of the cloud, which in itself having too much of changefulness for his purpose, is spoken of as one "that heareth not the loud winds when they call, and moveth altogether, if it move at all." And again of children, which, that it may remove from them the child restlessness, ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... soothe his most unquiet moods. Through all his years in London he remained a lowland Scot and was most at home in Annandale. With this district his fame is still bound up, as that of Walter Scott with the Tweed, or that of Wordsworth with ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... evening care. Mitford says, "To ply a care is an expression that is not proper to our language, and was probably formed for the rhyme share." Hales remarks: "This is probably the kind of phrase which led Wordsworth to pronounce the language of the Elegy unintelligible. Compare ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... extensive travels were in Portugal, lasting six months, and with regard to that journey I remember two painful incidents. His travelling companion, a younger brother, died abroad, in consequence of having slept in a damp bed. The other incident is vexatious rather than tragical, and yet Wordsworth would have seen tragedy in it also. During his absence from home, my grandfather had confided the care of his estate to an agent, who cut down the old avenue of oaks that led to the house, on the ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... in hostile ranks appeared: Some, tired of honest 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
... that are sown by nature,'" thought the minister, quoting Wordsworth to himself. "And I wonder what becomes of them! That's a pretty idea, little Rebecca, and I don't know whether you or my wife ought to have the more praise. What made you think of the stars lying on the flag's mother-breast'? Where did you ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... plan had been to reach Wordsworth, whose Lyrical Ballads (1798) had solaced him in fits of melancholy and had awakened in him a deep reverence for the neglected poet. His timidity preventing this, he made his way to Chester, where his mother then lived, in the hope of seeing a sister; was apprehended by the older members ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... letter to Sir Walter Scott, written in 1807, the poetess remarks that her “astonishment and disgust” rose to their utmost height while she read Wordsworth’s poem, “The Daffodils”—“dancing daffodils, ten thousand, as he says, in high dance in the breeze beside the river, whose waves dance with them, and the poet’s heart, we are told, danced too.” She deemed this unnatural writing, and mentions some of his verses she liked, notably ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... and Pope would have converted his vaulting Pegasus into a rocking-horse. Read any other blank verse but Milton's,—Thomson's, Young's, Cowper's, Wordsworth's,—and it will be found, from the want of the same insight into "the hidden soul of harmony," to be ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... for yourself? Look out of that window, lad; is there not poetry enough, beauty and glory enough, in that sky, those fields,—ay, in every fallen leaf,—to employ all your powers, considerable as I believe them to be? Why spurn the pure, quiet, country life, in which such men as Wordsworth have been content to live and ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... we listen to his verse tales we can never forget that it is the Rev. George Crabbe who is instructing us, or that his pedestal is the topmost story of his three-decker pulpit at Aldborough. Wordsworth's sympathy with the lives of the Cumberland peasantry is profound, and the time is surely not distant when such a poem as 'Michael' will win a place in the hearts of working men; but it is to be feared that in ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... twenty-nine, was busy with his ballads. In London a little baby saw the light of day, whom the world afterwards hailed as Lord Byron. Three British boys might have been seen with arms thrown over each other's shoulders, "dreaming greatly"—Coleridge aged sixteen, young Walter Scott, seventeen, and Wordsworth just eighteen. Across the Channel the French Revolution was at its height. Shelley and Keats were not yet born. Down on the Atlantic seaboard of America a new people just twelve years before had gone through the birth-throes of nationhood. ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... OF POETS Mother Earth Milton: Three Sonnets Wordsworth Keats Shelley Robert Browning Longfellow Thomas Bailey Aldrich ...
— The White Bees • Henry Van Dyke
... fail to come home to all to whom such poetry appeals. His hortatory and didactic poetry, as it expresses itself in the Commemoration Ode, is worthy, if not of the music and felicity of Milton and Wordsworth, at least of their tone, when that tone is most exalted. As a humorist he is inimitable. His humor is rooted in a fine sense of the becoming, and in a profounder insight into the character of his countrymen than that of any ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... long words the alternation of stress and no-stress was insisted on. I remember a schoolmaster who took his degree at Oxford in the year 1827 reproving a boy for saying ['A]lphesib['oe]us instead of Alphesib['oe]us, and I suspect that Wordsworth meant no ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... Castle, the latter crowned with a fine clump of trees. The name of the valley seems to have deceived some old writers into thinking it a region of chills and agues and of cold sour soil. It has always been famous for its oaks, but perhaps it may claim a greater fame as a minor Wordsworth country, for on the north side of the vale is Racedown Farm, the home of the poet for about two years. Dorothy Wordsworth said it was "the place dearest to my recollections" and "the first home I had." ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... didn't know, of course. She's been here for six months—has more influence than the whole diplomatic corps. Twists old Imshi Pasha round her little finger. She has played your game handsomely—I've been in her confidence. Wordsworth was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Hall was the glory of Cowfold and the pride of its inhabitants. The modern love of scenery was not known in Cowfold, and still less was that worship of landscape and nature known which, as before observed, is peculiar to the generation born under the influence of Wordsworth. We have learnt, however, from Zachariah that even before Wordsworth's days people were sometimes touched by dawn or sunset. The morning cheered, the moon lent pathos and sentiment, and the stars ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... which these three young people (for Dorothy certainly must be included as one of its authors) proposed to achieve by their book? Coleridge, in the Biographia Literaria, says (vol. ii. c. 1): "During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... of a similar order. In 1846, she left her native land—for ever, as the melancholy event proved—to join Mr and Mrs Spring in a European tour. Her letters home contain much pleasant gossip about some of the Old-World notabilities. Thus she records her interviews with Wordsworth in his Rydal retreat, with Dr Chalmers, Dr Andrew Combe, Mr De Quincey, the Howitts, &c. She visited Paris in the winter, and became acquainted with Lamennais, Beranger, Mme Dudevant, and others. Thence, in the spring of 1847, she went to Italy, where she remained until she embarked ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... most fitly was placed the altar of St. John Baptist. It was somewhere in the walls of this forehead that the original bishop's eye and dean's eye were once fixed, possibly in the rounded eye sockets which once stood where Bishop Wordsworth and Dean Butler ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... not to present exhaustively the substance of individual poems treating of poets. Analysis of Wordsworth's Prelude, Browning's Sordello, and the like, could scarcely give more than a re-presentation of what is already available to the reader in notes and essays on those poems. The purpose here is rather to pass in review the main body of such verse written ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... summer season. These boarders, at the time of their arrival, were projecting a jaunt to the Springs; and they talked of Lake George crystals, and Canadian music, and English officers, and 'dark blue Ontario,' with its beautiful little brood of lakelets, as Wordsworth would call them; and how one lady was dressed superbly at Saratoga; and how another was scandalized for always happening to drop her fan in the vicinity of the wealthiest beaux. All this fired the quiet imagination of the good farmer's wife; and no sooner had the boarders departed to enjoy themselves ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... 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 that it disqualifies for ordinary ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... The Persian Women. Hindoo Doctrine. Temperament and Susceptibilities. Madame de Stael's Opinion. Influence. Remark of Cato. Isabella's Influence. Should receive the Best Education. The Whole Nature to be Developed. Wordsworth's Description. The Future. To be Educated partly in Public. Good Intellectual training. Imparts Vigor. Good Taste. Knowledge. Secures good Mental Habits. Is Practical. Qualifies for Every Station. ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... man, if set down at a railway junction, will at once bestir himself to seek something to think of, something to do, and will spurn the gift of leisure. The incessant hurry of our current life has tragically lured us to forget the art of loitering. We are no longer able—like Wordsworth, on his "old gray stone"—to sit upon a trunk at some railway junction of our lives and listen reverently to the "mighty sum ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... this country; these he had collected for years, and become so familiar with the localities that, on coming here at last, he sought and found, at once, the very spot he wanted, and where he is as content as he hoped to be, thus realizing Wordsworth's description of the wise man, who "sees ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... are entirely ignorant of the construction of the so-called "dial" of Ahaz, and have little or no material directly available from outside sources to enable us to come to a clear and safe conclusion. No doubt, however, it was a sun-dial, or gnomon of some kind. Bishop Wordsworth lays stress on the apparent assertion that the miracle was not wrought on any other dial at Jerusalem except that of Ahaz, the father of Hezekiah, and he treats as a confirmation of this the statement in ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... built on the west side of the Derwent, a river named after the Derwent in Cumberland, celebrated by Wordsworth, the laureate of England, and the poet of the lakes, who thus associates with its beauties the ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... a philosopher as Peter the Great: both were instances of that 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
... be felt at an age when fancy is yet hardly awake and associations are but few, can with difficulty he conceived." But between the ages of eight and ten, an appreciation of external beauty is sufficiently common. No one doubts the accuracy of Wordsworth's account, in the Prelude of his early half-sensuous delight in mountain glory. It is impossible to define the influence of Nature, either on nations or individuals, or to say beforehand what selection from his varied surroundings a poet will for artistic purposes elect to make. ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... the early poems; and strikes one oddly in a man of such deep originality, who left so strong a print on all he touched, and whose work is so greatly distinguished by that character of "inevitability" which Wordsworth denied to Goethe. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... says Wordsworth, "is father of the man;" thus calling into conscious notice the fact, else faintly or not at all perceived, that whatsoever is seen in the maturest adult, blossoming and bearing fruit, must have preexisted by way of germ in the infant. Yes; all that is now broadly emblazoned in the ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... this has infused the finest poetry into many of his descriptions of the wilderness. He also was born and bred among the mountains, and though he had neither the poetical nor the philosophical genius of Wordsworth, and was inferior far in the perceptive, the reflective, and the imaginative faculties, still he could see, and feel, and paint too, in water colours and on air canvass, and is one of the Masters." Hear next Wilson's great rival in criticism, ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... He also liked good pictures, and always had among his friends well-known artists, as Alma-Tadema, Sir Frederick Leighton, and Burne-Jones. He read poetry widely, and strongly advocated the teaching of poetry in English schools. As to poetry, his own preferences are interesting. Wordsworth he considered too discursive; Shelley was too diffuse; Keats, he liked for pure beauty, Browning for strength, and Tennyson for his understanding of modern science; but most frequently of all he ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... is very wrong of us to have such sophisticated tastes. We ought to love these lonely hills and meadows far more. The natural man revels in solitude, and wants no wittier company than birds and flowers. Wordsworth made a constant companion of a pet daisy. He seldom went abroad without one or two trotting at his side, and a skylark would keep Shelley in society ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... his lament over the mountain-daisy cut down in its bloom, in a few simple words that find a response in the hearts of all men; and henceforth it is embalmed in our memories, and shall be as immortal as the star that shines in the far depths of the heavens. Like Wordsworth, he wanders upon the banks of his native lakes, and mingles his song with the noise of their waters, until the faintest whisper of the rippling waves seems but the echo of his voice. Wherever he goes fruits, flowers, and herbage spring up in his footsteps. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... God. It is at bottom a confession of the soul of its humility before its Creator. It is the constant presence of this emotion which gives permanent value to the otherwise tame and commonplace writings of Wordsworth. Wordsworth seldom climbs the height he attains in those nine lines, the ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... grasses, or along the flowery banks of water-courses, affords an agreeable stimulus, which sends the blood through the vital channels with unwonted force, and imparts to the cheeks the ruddy glow of health. Our poets acknowledge the silent influence of nature. Wordsworth has expressed this thought in his ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... parish throughout the kingdom. A volume of thought and of moral feelings, the offspring of thought, crowd upon me, as I review the different parts of this admirable man's life and creed. Only compare his conduct to James Wadsworth (probably some ancestral relative of my honoured friend, William Wordsworth: for the same name in Yorkshire, from whence his father came, is pronounced Wadsworth) with that of the far, far too highly rated, Bishop Hall; his letter to Hall tenderly blaming his (Hall's) bitterness to an old friend mistaken, and then his letter to that ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... he has none of your aunt's joy in poetry. When I read to her Wordsworth's 'Brougham Castle,' he said that he had never heard ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... pure-minded. I should like to pause and look at them a moment longer, for I have always been a little in love with them myself; I should like to add to the verses of our own dear poet certain lines of Wordsworth, of Burns, of Byron—but you, dear reader, will recall them readily, especially if you belong, as I hope you do, to the great and glorious fraternity of true lovers; if your heart burns and your pulses leap at mention of a certain ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... believe, of the name Horatius. Somewhere close at hand must have been the villa, on one side or the other of a small hill now called Monte Rotondo. We may take our Horace from our pocket, and feel, as with our Wordsworth at Dove Cottage, with our Scott at Ashestiel, that we are gazing on the hills, the streams, and valleys, which received the primal outpourings of their muse, and are for ever vocal with ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... begin to understand you, Saunders. Order the dog-cart, and Wordsworth's mare for leader; we'll give her a trial. You are ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... that these lines occur in a poem by Wordsworth. (Think of the expense!) How thankful we ought to be that Wordsworth was only a poet and not a musician. Fancy a symphony by Wordsworth! Fancy having to sit it out! And fancy what it would have been ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... Bard of the Lakes is another work in my friend's library, which I always handle with a tender interest. It is a copy of Wordsworth's Poetical Works, printed in 1815, with all the alterations afterwards made in the pieces copied in by the poet from the edition published in 1827. Some of the changes are marked improvements, and nearly all make the meaning clearer. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... roadsides, whose four yellow petals suggest one of the cross-bearing mustard tribe, but the pert little Lesser Celandine, Pilewort, or Figwort Buttercup (Ficaria Ficaria), one of the crowfoot family, whose larger solitary satiny yellow flowers so commonly star European pastures, was Wordsworth's special delight—a tiny, turf-loving plant, about which much poetical association clusters. Having stolen passage across the Atlantic, it is now making itself at home about College Point, Long ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... might have been of some use to her, but to Shakespeare she was not led, although there was a brown, dusty, one-volume edition at the Terrace; and of Wordsworth nobody whom she knew in Eastthorpe had so much as heard. A book would have turned much that was vague in her into definite shape; it would have enabled her to recognise herself; it would have given an orthodox expression to cloud singularity, ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... previously a stream of traction-engines had passed along the high road, dragging timber-wagons, tent-wagons, machinery, exhibits of all kinds, towards the Tregarrick Show. This heavy traffic (it was afterwards surmised) had helped what Wordsworth calls "the unimaginable touch of Time," shaking the dry-rotted joists of Scawns House, ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... defended. In his German version of the text, he gave the sense thus: "Every sacred writing, i.e., of the canonical Scriptures, is inspired of God and is useful for doctrine, etc." Bishops Moberly and Wordsworth, Archbishop Trench, and others of the Revision committee, disclaimed any responsibility for the rendering. Dean Burgon pronounced it "the most astonishing as well as calamitous literary blunder of the age." It was condemned by Dr. Tregelles, the ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... applicable, requires explanation. What does the poetry of sentiment imitate? What does a song imitate? How can the term be applied to all that class of poetry where the writer pours out his own reflections and feelings? The poetry of Wordsworth or of Burns can no more be said to be imitative, than the conversation of the same men, when, in their hours of intimate intercourse, the one may have given expression to his philanthropy, and the other to his friendship. But where the term is most applicable, it requires to be used guardedly. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Wordsworth in his earlier verse illustrated the same sentimental primitivism. It would be unfair to quote Peter Bell, for that is Wordsworth at his dreadful worst, but even in Tinlern Abbey, which has passages of incomparable majesty and beauty, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... here in Oxford that a grain of common sense entered the brain of the flower of chivalry. You might call it the dawn of reason. We had spent part of the morning in High Street, "the noblest old street in England," as our dear Hawthorne calls it. As Wordsworth had written a sonnet about it, aunt Celia was armed for the fray,—a volume of Wordsworth in one hand, and one of Hawthorne in the other. (I wish Baedeker didn't give such full information about what one ought to read before one can approach these places in a proper spirit.) When we had done ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... children, and lived and moved and had her being in a serene, unclouded, unvarying atmosphere of cheerful, self-forgetful content that was heroic in its absolute unconsciousness. She is the only person I can think of who appeared to me to have fulfilled Wordsworth's conception of ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... not be good. But no fear. He will remember a little and a little less, and he will call it dreams. Then he will forget altogether. When I passed my First Arts Examination in Calcutta that was all in the cram-book on Wordsworth. Trailing ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Terence, Mr. Will Shakespeare"; "good Will." In his period patriotic English critics called a comic dramatist "the English Terence," or "the English Plautus," precisely as American critics used to call Mr. Bryant "the American Wordsworth," or Cooper "the American Scott"; and as Scots called the Rev. Mr. Thomson "the Scottish Turner." Somewhere, I believe, ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... natural enough to cling to life. We are used to atmospheric existence, and can hardly conceive of ourselves except as breathing creatures. We have never tried any other mode of being, or, if we have, we have forgotten all about it, whatever Wordsworth's grand ode may tell us we remember. Heaven itself must be an experiment to every human soul which shall find itself there. It may take time for an earthborn saint to become acclimated to the celestial ether,—that is, if time can be said to exist for a disembodied spirit. We are all ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... every several mind to which they were addressed; and that their rank would also vary with the power and specific character of the mind engaged upon them. I once heard a very profound mathematician remonstrate against the impropriety of Wordsworth's receiving a pension from government, on the ground that he was "only a poet." If the study of mathematics had always this narrowing effect upon the sympathies, the science itself would need to be deprived of the rank usually assigned ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Wordsworth lived there for more than thirty years; and half a century has passed since he died. He was a skilful landscape gardener; and I suppose that in his lifetime, when the walks were being constructed and the place laid out, ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... which was opened up to the artist in his visions, and that was why he said: "Learn to see through, not with, the eye." Coleridge, too, asserted the primacy of Reason and imagination; and for Wordsworth poetry was "Reason in her most exalted form," just as for Keats "Beauty is truth, truth Beauty." Even so logical and prosaic a thinker as John Stuart Mill recognised that supremacy of the artist to which he himself could not ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... 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 ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... love-story; this passion is the mainspring of the chief personages, and their minds and hearts are revealed by its power. It is commonly said that Turgenev lacked passion; one might say with equal truth that Wordsworth lacked love of nature. Many of his novels and tales are tremulous with passion, but they are never noisy with it. Like the true patrician that he was, he studied restraint and reserve. The garden scene between Lisa and Lavretsky is the very ecstasy of passion, although, like ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... seemed rather inconsistent in Matthew Arnold to have praised Emerson's poetry at all; and this was the more surprising after his courageous defence of Wadsworth a short time before. Those who like Emerson's poetry usually like Wordsworth's and vice versa. ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... and solitude; and, even in the choice of a grave, will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the church-yard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man, and wishing—in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth— ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... Review represented the Whigs, began, with Gifford for its editor. Among the essayists of that time, in a lighter vein, were John Wilson ("Christopher North"), poet and critic in one; and the genial humorist, the friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Charles Lamb. John Foster (1770-1843) was an original essayist on grave themes. In philosophy, Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), a clear and fluent expositor, and Thomas Brown (1778-1821), kept up the reputation of the Scottish school founded by Reid. Burke, Alison, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Wordsworth and to one of Wordsworth's simple, I am almost ready to say silly, poems. I am in doubt what to think of Wordsworth. I should be ashamed of some of his poems if I had written them myself, and yet there are points of great beauty, and lines which once in the mind ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... desire to 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 Routh on receiving a visit from Bishop Wordsworth ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... vol. i. p. 320. The curious experience, that the repetition of his own name induced a kind of trance, is used by the poet in his beautiful mystical poem, "The Ancient Sage." It would, indeed, have been equally easy to illustrate this topic from Wordsworth's ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... of touch with this great truth, we forget to accept its invitation and its hospitality, when in quest of external success our works become unspiritual and unexpressive. This is what Wordsworth complained of when ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... Browning spends New Year's Day, 1836, at the house of the tragedian and meets John Forster; Macready urges him to write a play; his subsequent interview with the tragedian; he plans a drama to be entitled "Narses"; meets Wordsworth and Walter Savage Landor at a supper party, when the young poet is toasted, and Macready again proposes that Browning should write a play, from which arose the idea of "Strafford"; his acquaintance with Wordsworth and Landor; MS. of "Strafford" accepted; its performance at ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... language not of words, but of things, transmuting the eternal laws to tones, and pouring into the soul by their means a stream of solicitations to the secret springs of the buried life? Such voices there are: Wordsworth heard one of them in the song of "The Solitary Reaper." In such a voice, rolling forth from the shadows, and in exquisite articulation, there came ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... pause in what he was saying. He had been describing the country of Wordsworth, and had been dwelling on Grasmere and Eydal Mount, in the tone, indeed, of one who had no vital concern whatever with the Lake poets or their poetry, but still with an evident desire to interest his companion. And following ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Dr. Drury was master and Byron and Peel were pupils, Harrow has declined to insignificance, and been by the abilities of Dr. Wordsworth raised again. The term of Harrow gentlemen still deservedly survives, Harrow being still the gate through which the rich son of a parvenu family may most safely pass on his way to Oxford, if his father desires, as all fathers ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... Vindiciae, vol. ii. The most complete account of this remarkable man is that by Dr. Peckard, formerly Master of Magdalen College, Cambridge, entitled Memoirs of the Life of Nicholas Ferrar, published in 1790, which has now become extremely scarce, but has been reprinted by Dr. Wordsworth, in his Ecclesiastical Biography, who has given in an Appendix an account of the visit of the younger Nicholas Ferrar to London, from a MS. in the Lambeth Library. The Life of Nicholas Ferrar, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... will very soon be given to the American public in an edition of suitable elegance. The last great race of poets and literary men, observes a writer in the London Standard, is now rapidly vanishing from the scene: of the splendid constellation, in the midst of which Campbell, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Southey, Crabbe, and Byron, were conspicuous, how few remain! Moore (rapidly declining), Rogers (upward of eighty), Professor Wilson, Montgomery, and Leigh Hunt, are nearly all. It is fitting that we prize these few, as the remnants of a magnificent group, which cannot be expected very ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... foot of the lake, stands a spruce and rather large house of modern aspect, but with several gables and much overgrown with ivy,—a very pretty and comfortable house, built, adorned, and cared for with commendable taste. We inquired whose it was, and the coachman said it was "Mr. Wordsworth's," and that "Mrs. Wordsworth was still residing there." So we were much delighted to have seen his abode, and as we were to stay the night at Grasmere, about two miles farther on, we determined to come back and inspect it as particularly as should be allowable. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... his earlier verse illustrated the same sentimental primitivism. It would be unfair to quote Peter Bell, for that is Wordsworth at his dreadful worst, but even in Tinlern Abbey, which has passages of incomparable majesty and beauty, there are lines in ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... admiration, gold-lace, hair-powder, and wine. That is no apocalypse from which a man returns to whine and beg. Burns complains of Scotland and poverty, Byron of England and respectability, and they are both so far paupers unfed at home. Wordsworth finds London a wilderness, and goes more than content to good company in lonely Cumberland, to eat a crust and drink water with the gods. Socrates is barefooted. He has one want so pressing that he can have no other want, and has set his lips to a cup which hides his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... I find it difficult to forgive the unwomanly inconsistency into which she betrays her heroine. Allow me to say that in my humble opinion nothing in the whole range of literature so fully portrays a perfect woman as that noble sketch by Wordsworth, and the inimitable ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... starry heavens have one side for the astronomer, as astronomer, and another for the poet, as poet. The nightingale, the skylark, the cuckoo, move one sort of interest in an ornithologist, and a very different sort in a Shelley or a Wordsworth. The hoary and stupendous formations of the inorganic world, the thousand tribes of insects, the great universe of plants, from those whose size and form and hue make us afraid as if they were deadly monsters, down to 'the meanest flower that blows,' all these are clothed with one set ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... and all the other so-called fetishes, are simply absent in the old hymns, though they appear in more modern hymns, particularly those of the Atharva-Veda. When artificial objects are mentioned and celebrated in the Rig-Veda, they are only such as might be praised even by Wordsworth or Tennyson—chariots, bows, quivers, axes, drums, sacrificial vessels and similar objects. They never assume any individual character; they are simply mentioned as useful or precious, it may ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... Arcadia"; it was published ten years after it had been composed. The Arcadia is the first English example of the prose pastoral romance, as the Shepherd's Calendar is of our pastoral verse. Imitative essays in its style kept appearing for two hundred years after it, till Wordsworth and other poets who knew the country drove its unrealities out of literature. The aim of it and of the school to which it belonged abroad was to find a setting for a story which should leave the author ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Newton and Leibnitz would carry it with them in pathless fields of speculation, while Peter the Great was smiting an arrogant priest in Russia, and William was ascending the English throne. From its poetry Cowper, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning would catch the divine afflatus; from its statesmanship Burke, Romilly, and Bright would learn how to create and redeem institutions; from its melodies Handel, Bach, Mendelssohn, and ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... down by the weight of general authority and received canon law. Strong instincts are apt to make men strange and rude; self-confidence, however well founded, to give much of what they do or say the appearance of impertinence. Look at the self-confidence of Wordsworth, stiffening every other sentence of his prefaces into defiance; there is no more of it than was needed to enable him to do his work, yet it is not a little ungraceful here and there. Suppose this stubbornness and self-trust in a youth, laboring in an art of which the executive ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... they are perfectly within their rights. It is not a crime not to love literature. It is not a sign of imbecility. The mandarins of literature will order out to instant execution the unfortunate individual who does not comprehend, say, the influence of Wordsworth on Tennyson. But that is only their impudence. Where would they be, I wonder, if requested to explain the influences that went ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett |
