"Wordsworth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Shelley; and as the music of the nightingale or the skylark is far exceeding in excellence that of the other members of the feathered kingdom, so does Shelley rank as a poet far above all other poets, making even the poet of nature, the great Wordsworth himself, confess that Shelley was indeed the master of harmonious verse in our modern literature. It is broadly laid down in the Marvinian theory that all poets are insane. I would much like to break a lance with the learned Professor of Psychology and Medical Jurisprudence; ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... phenomena (which was never asserted) would interrupt us all from time to time by declaring his intense satisfaction with it all. It was a splendid trick. We tried to convince him that his individual satisfaction was irrelevant to us, but it was, as Wordsworth says, "Throwing words away." It was a beautiful trick; and he was satisfied, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... remarks have perhaps indicated our opinion. He was rather a scholar somewhat out of his element, and unreconciled to the world, than a thorough gentleman; irritable, vehement, and proud—his finer traits were only known to his intimates, who probably felt that in Wordsworth's words, ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... ideas in literature, philosophy, science, and, religion have come from just this snug little acquaintance with Nature. Probably the most original poet in the last hundred years was Wordsworth. However much he lacked in some respects, he has done most towards shaping the minds of other poets, and towards advancing new and beautiful theories. His honest ideas, his simple truths, were told him by the ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... devotion. Wanting just then an angel to complete his picture, he sketched the face and the form of the unsuspecting lady. By a pleasant coincidence he afterwards made her the angel of his home—his good wife. The painter doubtless proved the truth of Wordsworth's beautiful lines— ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... 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 ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... chit-chat," of Cowper, whose "Task" appeared in the preceding year. But it was in Coleridge himself and his close contemporaries and followers that the splendor of the new poetry showed itself. He was two years younger than Wordsworth, a year younger than Scott; he was sixteen at the birth of Byron, twenty at that of Shelley, twenty-four at that of Keats; and he outlived all of them except Wordsworth. His genius blossomed early. "The Ancient Mariner," his greatest poem, was published some years before Wordsworth's "Ode on ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... not without its influence. Poetry in modern times has certainly become diluted in strength and value; but, though I have not at all a large acquaintance, I think there are many good modern poets. I much admire Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality," as well as many of his shorter and simpler pieces—"The Longest Day," for instance. There is a great deal of good instruction, as well as deep thought, in his poetry; but there is not, I think, very clearly an evangelical spirit; indeed, the "Excursion," which is beautiful, ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... [Footnote 112: See Wordsworth's beautiful inscription—"For the spot where the hermitage stood on St. Herbert's island, Derwentwater."—Ed. of ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... negation, to a play, if not to a man. Chaucer, but for a few poems, is impossible; Spenser's poetry is generally duller than the Presidents' messages before Mr. Roosevelt's time; Milton is a trial of the spirit in three-fourths of his verse; Wordsworth is only not so bad as Byron, who thought him so much worse; Shakespeare himself, when he is reverently supposed not to be Shakespeare, is reading for martyrs; Dante's science and politics outweigh his ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... only son. I was an only child also, speaking as the world speaks, and not as Wordsworth's "simple child" spoke. But let me rather use the "little maid's" reckoning, and say that I have, rather than that I had, a sister. "Her grave is green, it may be seen." She peeped into the world, and we called her Alice; then she went away again and took my mother ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Tom Paine was about the only English sympathizer with the French Revolution, and Shelley, Landor, and Swinburne only three mad poets. It is forgotten now that Burns subscribed to the funds of the French Republic, that Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Moore all wrote republican odes to it, and that at the beginning of the century Southey and Brougham were republican, not to speak of Bentham and Godwin and other writers on whose books ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... heard her then? No, this is one of the series called 'Homes and Haunts of the Poets.' Last week we had Wordsworth and the Lake Poets, to-day we are to have Goethe and Weimar. She is a wonderful creature—all the women of her family are geniuses. You know, of course, that her mother was Irene Astarte Pratt, who ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... Stuart Mill's experience in reading Wordsworth. Mill was a man of letters as well as a scientific economist and philosopher, and we expect to find that men of letters have been nourished on literature; reading must necessarily have been a large part of their professional preparation. ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... divided.[24] Further, the division between clauses may fall in the middle of a foot, as in Wordsworth's lines ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... he has been wandering about in all directions. He has been to the Lakes, and is now at Edinburgh. He likes Southey. He gave the laureate a quantity of hints for his next volume of the Peninsular War, but does not speak very warmly of Wordsworth: gentlemanly man, but only reads his ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... de Gu['e]rin will be always associated in my mind. I discovered them about the same time. I had been solemnly told by an eminent Philadelphian that Wordsworth was the only poet worth considering, after Shakespeare, and that Keats had no intellectual value whatever. But I was not looking for intellectual value. I mixed up the intellect with a kind of scientific jargon about protoplasm ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... I have been reading Wordsworth's poems again, and I verily believe for the fiftieth time. They contain a mine of lofty, beautiful, and natural thoughts. I never peruse them without feeling proud that England has such a poet, and without finding a love ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... 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
... Wordsworth, who got it from a passage in Shelvocke's voyages, where a long spell of bad weather was attributed to an ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... that the great poets have ever been the best interpreters of the songs of birds. In many of the plays of Shakespeare, especially where the scene is laid in the primeval forest, his most delicious bits of fancy are inspired by the flitting throng. Wordsworth and Tennyson, and many of the minor English poets, are pervaded with bird notes, and Shelley's masterpiece, The Skylark, will long survive his greater and more ambitious poems. Our own poet, Cranch, has left one immortal stanza, and Bryant, and Longfellow, ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [June, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... 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 ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... 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 pretext ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... the news of the acquittal reached them. Whilst lauding their Creator his majesty was present. But a far more picturesque account of the case is given by an ancestor of the present Lord Lonsdale's, whose memoirs (still in MS.) are alluded to in one of his Ecclesiastic Sonnets by Mr Wordsworth, our present illustrious laureate. One trait is of a nature so fine, and so inevitable under similar circumstances of interest, that, but for the intervention of the sea, we should certainly have witnessed its repetition on the termination of the Dublin trials. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... Tertullian and the Sinaitic Codex is defended by Tischendorf; the approximate reading of B, C, D, &c. is admitted by Lachmann, Tregelles, Milligan, Westcott and Hort, and the received text has an apologist in Mr. M'Clellan (with Tholuck and Wordsworth). On these points then it should be borne in mind that Tertullian may present the true reading; on all the others he is ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... 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 ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... Saturday Night of Burns is, in its own humble way, as quietly beautiful, as simplex munditiis, as the scenes of Tell. No other has even approached them; though some gifted persons have attempted it. Mr. Wordsworth is no ordinary man; nor are his pedlars, and leech-gatherers, and dalesmen, without their attractions and their moral; but they sink into whining drivellers beside Roesselmann the Priest, Ulric the Smith, Hans of the Wall, and the other ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... Wordsworth alludes to him in his eighteenth sonnet on Durdon as a worthy compeer of the country parson of Chaucer, and in the seventh book of the Excursion an abstract of ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... Blessed Wordsworth! How he makes us understand! And the pearl never heard of him until now! Think of reading Lucy to a class, and when you finish, seeing a fourteen-year-old pair of lips quivering with delight, and a pair of eyes brimming with ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and Milton, is chosen to represent the seventeenth-century struggle for faith and freedom. In the eighteenth century, Washington and Jefferson and Thomas Paine appear side by side with Burke and Burns and Wordsworth. Shelley and Byron, Tennyson and Carlyle are here of course, but with them are John Stuart Mill and John Bright and John Morley. There are passages from Webster and Emerson, from Lowell and Walt Whitman and Lincoln, and finally, from the eloquent lips of living men—from Lloyd ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... of the onlooker-standpoint in science. The picture of man inherent in Reid's philosophy. Man's original gift of remembering his pre-earthly life. The disappearance of this memory in the past, and its re-appearance in modern times. Pelagius versus Augustine. Wordsworth and Traherne. Traherne, a 'Reidean before ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... Fudges' (Garnett), Hibernicae Filius (Rossetti), or, perhaps, Hibernicae Fidicen. Castles and Oliver (3 2 1; 7 4 4) were government spies, as readers of Charles Lamb are aware. The allusion in 6 36 is to Wordsworth's "Thanksgiving Ode on The Battle of Waterloo", original version, published in 1816:— But Thy most dreaded instrument, In working out a pure intent, Is Man—arrayed for mutual slaughter, —Yea, Carnage ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... thoughts will slide Into a lover's head; "O mercy!" to myself I cried, "If Lucy should be dead!" Wordsworth. ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... democratic tendencies and affiliations have appeared, but none that have carried the temper and quality of the people, the masses, into the same regions, or blended the same humanity and commonness with the same commanding personality and spirituality. In recent English poetry the names of Burns and Wordsworth occur to mind, but neither of these men had anything like Whitman's breadth of relation to the mass of mankind, or expressed anything like his sweeping cosmic emotion. Wordsworth's muse was clad in homespun, but in no strict sense was ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... Probably Shelley was attracted to the lake country as much by the 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, saying that he could have been more useful to the young poet and metaphysician ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... sway, and showed, with Dugald Stewart's miserable attempt at establishing two forms of association, its incapacity to rise to the conception of the imagination. With the poet Coleridge, England also showed the influence of German thought, and Coleridge elaborated with Wordsworth a more correct conception of poetry and of its difference from science. But the most notable contribution in English at that period came from another poet, P.B. Shelley, whose Defence of Poetry contains profound, though unsystematic views, as to the distinction between reason and imagination, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... interchange. Arrived at the beautiful spot fixed on, sunlight drifting over glades of fern, the shadowy woods encircling a lake of blue and silver, she could say, with just the right emphasis of helpless admiration: "Wonderful—wonderful;"—could quote a line of Wordsworth, while her eye passed over the figure of Sir Basil, talking to Rose at a little distance, and over Jack's ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... 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 ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the paper drop. He began to write, and he wrote without stopping with great ease and inspiration for nearly two hours. Then as midnight struck, he put down his pen, and gazed into the dying fire. He felt as Wordsworth's skater felt on Esthwaite, when, at a sudden pause, the mountains and cliffs seemed to whirl past him in a vast headlong procession. So it was in Meynell's mind with thoughts and ideas. Gradually they calmed and slackened, ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... more eagerly than ever,—Sartor Resartus, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Heine. But money must be earned. Ah! if genius could only develop in ease and prosperity. It rarely has the chance. The tree grows best when the dirt is oftenest stirred about the roots; perhaps the best in us comes ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... group of poets—Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and, finally, Tennyson—differing widely in moral principles and spiritual temper, but all agreeing more or less in this ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... shrubbery on the hillside back of Dove Cottage, Keswick, where Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy listened for the coming of this "darling of the spring"; in the willows overhanging Shakespeare's Avon; from the favorite haunts of Chaucer ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... Williams has exalted the ideal of 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 ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Hymn Isaac Watts Cradle Song William Blake Lullaby Carolina Nairne Lullaby of an Infant Chief Walter Scott Good-Night Jane Taylor "Lullaby, O Lullaby" William Cox Bennett Lullaby Alfred Tennyson The Cottager to Her Infant Dorothy Wordsworth Trot, Trot! Mary F. Butts Holy Innocents Christina Georgina Rossetti Lullaby Josiah Gilbert Holland Cradle Song Josiah Gilbert Holland An Irish Lullaby Alfred Perceval Graves Cradle Song Josephine Preston Peabody Mother-Song ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... nothing more than a rough polling-booth where coarse, drunken men, elbowing each other, wade knee-deep in mud to drop a little piece of paper two inches long into a box—simply this and nothing more. The poet Wordsworth, showing the blank materialism of those who see only with their outward eyes, says of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... has none of your aunt's joy in poetry. When I read to her Wordsworth's 'Brougham Castle,' he said that he had ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... only of the hymns of the church but of many poems that are not suitable for singing. English poetry is especially rich in meditative and devotional elements, and of no period has this been more true than of the nineteenth century. Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Brownings, Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, on the other side of the sea, with Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Lanier, Sill and Gilder on this side—these and many others—have made most precious additions to our store ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... work on Athens and Attica, Mr. Wordsworth has well observed the peculiar propriety of this reference to the examples of Harmodius and Aristogiton, as addressed to Callimachus. They were from the same borough (aphidnae) as the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... 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 his own generation "Mr Wudsworth" served rather—as a ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... employed is 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 in the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Wordsworth—though he had not the inestimable advantage of a nineteenth-century education and the inheritance of the Darwinian philosophy—does nevertheless put the matter of the Genius of the Child in a way which (with the alteration of a few conventional terms) we scientific moderns are quite ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... question as to the soul's origin is that of Preexistence. This may be called the Oriental theory, for almost the whole Orient holds this view. The substance of the teaching is suggested by Wordsworth, in his "Ode to Immortality," ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... eloquence and power not surpassed by 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 ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... account. Amidst much idle matter, whose only purpose is to swell the bulk of the volumes, are some rather interesting anecdotes of literary celebrities. Some over-laudatory epistles from Sir Egerton Brydges, and a characteristic letter or two from Wordsworth, containing among other matters, a criticism upon Scott's Guy Mannering, in which considerable praise is awarded to the management of "this lady," as he solemnly denominates Meg Merrilies, are perhaps the best things in the book. It reminds one, but at a wide interval, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... of the contents are from British and other foreign authors, such as William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, Mrs. S. F. Adams, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mrs. Charles, Frances Ridley Havergal, Anna Letitia Waring, Jean Ingelow, Adelaide Anne Procter, Mme. ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... must remember that the tragic aspect of life is only one aspect. We cannot arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one of their important works. Speaking very broadly, one may say that these poets at their best always look at things in one light; but Hamlet and Henry IV. and Cymbeline reflect things from quite distinct positions, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... the wildest, tenderest, most original and most purely imaginative poems of modern times. Byron's "Hours of Idleness" would never find a reader except from an intrepid and indefatigable curiosity. In Wordsworth's first preludings there is but a dim foreboding of the creator of an era. From Southey's early poems, a safer augury might have been drawn. They show the patient investigator, the close student of history, and the unwearied explorer of the beauties ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... this case signifies the lack of the small, sweet courtesies which are the peaceable fruits of the Gospel of Conventionality. Breeding, good or bad, environs the growing lad, as Wordsworth tells us heaven lies about us in our infancy. The boy whose mother allows him to lounge into her presence with his cap upon his head, whose sisters wink indulgently at his shirt sleeves in parlor and at table—will don his hat and doff his coat in his wife's sitting-room. ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... 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
... of expression, carefully balanced antitheses, and all the mechanical devices of the school were placed in abeyance. There was a general return to Nature, to simplicity, to straightforwardness—not without imagination, however. Wordsworth, besides insisting, in a famous passage, the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, on the spontaneity of good poetry, recorded his tribute to the Reliques: 'I do not think that there is an able writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligation to the Reliques.' ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... 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. ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... in 1813 in memory of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day when the poet had first met Christiane Vulpius. Its never failing charm lies in its utter simplicity, its Selbstverstaendigkeit, and in this one respect it may well be compared to Wordsworth's Lucy ("She ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... somehow or other, express an honest wish for a Spiritual Boat. I will not dwell on poor Shelley's paper navies, and seas of quicksilver, lest we should begin to think evil of boats in general because of that traitorous one in Spezzia Bay; but it is a triumph to find the pastorally minded Wordsworth imagine no other way of visiting the stars than in a boat "no bigger than the crescent moon";[I] and to find Tennyson—although his boating, in an ordinary way, has a very marshy and punt-like character—at last, in his ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... Wordsworth 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. ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... power which we sometimes speak of as if it were 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 ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... stories of the deaths of kings" with the best. In England he loved going to see graveyards, and knew where every poet was buried. He was very familiar with the poetry of the immediate past—Cowper, Coleridge, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and the rest. He liked us, so everything we did was right to him. He could not help being guided entirely by his feelings. If he disliked a thing, he had no use for it. Some men can say, "I hate this play, but of its kind it is admirable." Willie Winter ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... letter of Miss Caroline Fox was forwarded to him by the lady to whom it had been addressed. The writer stated that John Sterling had tried to read the poem and been repelled by its verbosity; and she ended with this question: "doth he know that Wordsworth will devote a fortnight or more to the discovery of the single word that is the one fit for ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... poetic pantheism possible, save on the condition of embracing the whole world of phenomena in one unique conception: of feeling and comprehending the life of the universe in its divine unity. There is nothing of this in Goethe. There is pantheism in some parts of Wordsworth; in the third canto of "Childe Harold," and in much of Shelley; but there is none in the most admirable compositions of Goethe; wherein life, though admirably comprehended and reproduced in each of its successive manifestations, is never understood as a whole. Goethe is the poet of details, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... 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
... they were made. In that sense, at least, his kinship is with the great conservative revolution of the generation which followed him. Hegel and Savigny in Germany, de Maistre and Bonald in France, Coleridge and the later Wordsworth in England, are in a true sense his disciples. That does not mean that any of them were directly conscious of his work but that the movement he directed had its necessary outcome in their defence of his ideals. ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... 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
... had one feeling not learned from books, and that could not have been learned from books, the deepest of all that connect themselves with natural scenery. It is the feeling which in 'The Hart-leap Well' of Wordsworth, in his 'Danish Boy,' and other exquisite poems is brought out, viz., the breathless, mysterious, Pan-like silence that haunts the noon-day. If there were winds abroad, then I was roused myself into sympathetic tumults. But if this dead silence ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... former consider that it is most important in the present condition of man for him to look after his material welfare; while the latter teach that if he first subject thought and life to truth and duty, "all these things will be added unto him." Wordsworth has cast this latter opinion, and the myths which are its types, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... of character, and one can imagine them all in an hour of need, being faithful to any trust like the darling of the Red Branch. These shining lads never grew up amid books. They are as much children of nature as the Lucy of Wordsworth's poetry. It might be said of them as the poet of ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... 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, ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... blandly assented and Clive listened with pleasure? Such opinions were not of the Colonel's time. He tried in vain to construe Oenone, and to make sense of Lamia. Ulysses he could understand; but what were these prodigious laudations bestowed on it? And that reverence for Mr. Wordsworth, what did it mean? Had he not written Peter Bell, and been turned into deserved ridicule by all the reviews? Was that dreary Excursion to be compared to Goldsmith's Traveller, or Doctor Johnson's Imitation ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Armor," although they may sound but gravely beside the Tyrtaean strains of Arndt and Koerner, are nevertheless full of stately and inspiring music. They remind one of Wordsworth's phrase,— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... the lives of poets, we too often see how their inspiration flagged and failed. Milton indeed wrote his noblest verse in middle-age, after a life immersed in affairs. Wordsworth went on writing to the end, but all his best poetry was written in about five early years. Tennyson went on to a patriarchal age, but there is little of his later work that bears comparison with what he wrote ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... was able to have of Wordsworth's conversation, and I think I had quite as much as was good for me. He has a good philosophical bust, a long, thin, gaunt face, much wrinkled and weatherbeaten: of the Curwen style of figure and face, but with a more cheerful ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... full of Shakspeare; let us go up among the hills and see where another poet lived and lies. Here is Rydal Mount, the home of Wordsworth. Two-storied, ivy-clad, hedge-girdled, dropped into a crease among the hills that look down dimly from above, as if they were hunting after it as ancient dames hunt after a dropped thimble. In these walks he used to go "booing about," as his rustic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... passing, flower blown down on flower: That sweet-tongued shadow, like a star's that passed Singing, and light was from its darkness cast To paint the face of Painting fair with praise:[1] And that wherein forefigured smiles the pure Fraternal face of Wordsworth's Elidure Between two ...
— Sonnets, and Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... name. I am a worshipper at the shrine of Wordsworth and Nature. Helen and I long ago defined a tourist as a being with straps. I defy you to discover a strap about me, and I left my ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a man must turn over half a library to write one book. When an authoress told Wordsworth she had spent six hours on a poem, he replied that he would have spent six weeks. Think of Bishop Hall spending thirty years on one of his works! Owens was working on the "Commentary to the Epistle to the Hebrews" for twenty ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... 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
... could a thinker of his power of brain cover leagues of letter-paper with windy nonsense and mawkish insincerity? And finally, of what quality was the talk of one whose social life was entirely monologue? To the first of these questions Wordsworth perhaps helps with an analogy, but not very far; for it is certain that Wordsworth's opinion of the importance of his own verses was inflexible, whereas Coleridge, having another medium of expression, was by no means so insistent upon publishing. Upon ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... a reputation that probably will not last above one or two generations?" Sir Walter Scott once asked Ballantyne. Two generations, according to the usual reckoning, have passed; "'T is Sixty Years since" the "wondrous Potentate" of Wordsworth's sonnet died, yet the reputation on which he set so little store survives. A constant tide of new editions of his novels flows from the press; his plots give materials for operas and plays; he has been criticised, praised, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... I admit two orders of poets, but no third; and by these two orders I mean the Creative (Shakespeare, Homer, Dante), and Reflective or Perceptive (Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson). But both of these must be first-rate in their range, though their range is different; and with poetry second-rate in quality no one ought to be allowed to trouble mankind. There is quite enough of the best,—much more than we can ever read or enjoy in the length of a life; ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... I arose the possessor of eight shillings, a box of playthings, a plum-cake, and a heavy heart. It is most true, that which Wordsworth hath said or sung, "The boy's the father of the man." When I mingled with my schoolmates, and the unexpected possession of my various wealth had transpired, I found many of them very kind and fatherly indeed, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... [Note 3: Compare Wordsworth's Essay on the Poor Law Amendment Bill. I quote one important passage: "But, if it be not safe to touch the abstract question of man's right in a social state to help himself even in the last extremity, may we not ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... 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, ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... weakness. It may be said without exaggeration that the few meetings of his life with those who had a touch of the poet in them had been exquisitely uncomfortable. Silent, almost taciturn by nature, he was a great reader of poetry, and seldom went to sleep without having digested a page or two of Wordsworth, Milton, Tennyson, or Scott. Byron, save such poems as 'Don Juan' or 'The Waltz,' he could but did not read, for fear of setting a bad example. Burns, Shelley, and Keats he did not care for. Browning pained him, except by such things ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... it, so far as I have read, by 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, I am able, by my own constant and close observation, to certify ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... picturesque and beautiful ecclesiastical ruin in Great Britain. When the sun is setting, or better still, under the mystic light of the harvest moon, the picture formed by the roofless abbey in its perfect setting, needs a Wordsworth to ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... even talk of an action for libel); but it seems to me that whatever may have been intended, the words contain more of compliment than censure. In this hurrying age, it is surely high praise to have one's "wise passiveness" (as Wordsworth called it) so emphasised. The passage calls to mind Diogenes requesting, as the greatest of possible boons, that Alexander the Great would stand aside and not interrupt the sunshine; only at Steyning would one seek for Diogenes to-day. No ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... Mr. Bailey's conclusion really follow? Is it possible to test a poet's greatness by the largeness of his 'view of life'? How wide, one would like to know, was Milton's 'view of humanity'? And, though Wordsworth's sense of the position of man in the universe was far more profound than Dante's, who will venture to assert that he was the greater poet? The truth is that we have struck here upon a principle which lies at the root, not only of Mr. Bailey's criticism of Racine, but ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... 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. (Yet there is retardation often by long similes.) ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... aspects of Woman's nature, represented by the ancients as Muse and Minerva. It is the former to which the writer in the Pathfinder looks. It is the latter which Wordsworth has in mind, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... more flexible and more patient than Voltaire's, would call upon us, especially when his learning got a little out of control, to be more than patient. Now and then he would bore us. "Candide" never bored anybody except William Wordsworth. ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... of argument and plan. Not that we believe that Keats was incapable of or averse to 'fundamental brain-work'—he had an understanding more robust, firmer in its hold of reality, more closely cast upon experience, than any one of his great contemporaries, Wordsworth not excepted—but at that phase in his evolution he was simply not concerned with understanding. 'Endymion' is not a record or sublimation of experience; it is itself an experience. It was the liberation of a verbal inhibition, and the ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... 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 awoke unanswerable interrogations in Cowfold, although it knew no poetry, save Dr. Watts, ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... nature With her first growths—detaching by the stroke A chip or splinter, to resolve his doubts; And, with that ready answer satisfied, The substance classes by some barbarous name. And hurries on."—WORDSWORTH. ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... Edgeworth's Parent's Assistant and Miss Hannah More's Sacred Dramas 'Rubbish.' The sister University, home though she be of nearly every English poet worth reading, rejected the Siege of Corinth, though the work of a Trinity man; would not take in the Thanksgiving Ode of Mr. Wordsworth, of St. John's College; declined Leigh Hunt's Story of Rimini; vetoed the Headlong Hall of the inimitable Peacock, and, most wonderful of all, would have nothing to say to Scott's Antiquary, being probably ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... The words of Wordsworth's immortal ode rushed into his brain, and he recognised that this ignorant lad possessed a knowledge which was hidden from the world. Heaven, with its clouds of glory, lay close around him, ignorant of worldly wisdom ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Eric Mackay for the latest ode to the lark, one of peculiar gracefulness and impassioned beauty. In my opinion, this is a better production than either of Wordsworth's, superior to Hogg's, and, though not so intellectual as Shelley's, rivals it in truth. Mackay's is the lark itself, Shelley's is himself listening, with unwearied ears and tightly-stretched imagination, to the lark. ...
— The Song of the Flag - A National Ode • Eric Mackay
... too, he was sensible that, though the stranger betrayed no acquaintance with literature, nor seemed to have conversed with cultivated minds, yet the results of such acquaintance and converse were here. Middleton was inclined to think him, however, an old man, one of those itinerants, such as Wordsworth represented in the "Excursion," who smooth themselves by the attrition of the world and gain a knowledge equivalent to or better than that of books from the actual intellect of man ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Jack I went about alone, Saw Wordsworth's writing-table, And made the higher by a stone The "man" upon ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... innumerable 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. Books think for me.' ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Miss Wordsworth thought she had shot an arrow home to his heart over night, a fresh smile and dart from little Mary Ogleby's dark eyes extracted it in the morning, and made him think of her till the commanding figure and noble air of the Honourable Miss Letitia ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... before whose keels, full long embayed In polar ice, propitious winds have made Unlooked-for outlet to an open sea.' WORDSWORTH. ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... Loves. It is the love for living things and the sympathy felt in them that induce the poet to give life and feeling to the plant, as Shelley to the 'Sensitive Plant;' as Shakspeare, when he speaks to us through the sweet voices of Ophelia and Perdita; as Wordsworth, in his poems to the Daisy, Daffodil, and Celandine; as Burns in his Mountain Daisy. As a proof of the power of the Imagination, through its Truth, and Love, to invest the lowest of God's creatures with interest, we ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Hunger and pain drove Lee to the invention of his loom. Left a widow with a family to support, in mid-life Mrs. Trollope took to authorship and wrote a score of volumes. The most piteous tragedy in English literature is that of Coleridge. Wordsworth called him the most myriad-minded man since Shakespeare, and Lamb thought him "an archangel slightly damaged." The generosity of his friends gave the poet a home and all its comforts without the necessity of toil. Is it possible that ease and lack of responsibility, with opium, helped wreck him? ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... as Sterling exhorted, "in religion and radicalism." He saw life differently; more practically, if more selfishly; to one rhapsodizing about the "plain living and high thinking" of Wordsworth's sonnet, he answered: "You know that you prefer dining with people who have good glass and china and plenty of servants." For Tennyson's poetry he even then felt admiration; quotes, nay, misquotes, in ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... the same opinion, among whom are Chrysostom, Grotius, Bishop Wordsworth, and Dean Alvord. Dean Howson adds: "It should be particularly noticed in connection with this that in the early part of the chapter no such directions are given concerning the wives of the bishops, ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... told 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 if he had ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... little slipshod, sometimes (though not a bit more than ours when we drop our "g's" and things like that, only more guileless sounding); but without seeming a bit as if he wanted to show off what he knew—which is so boring—he quoted Shakespeare, and Wordsworth, and Tennyson; and in mentioning his work at the hives in the morning, asked if we had read Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee." From that he fell to discussing other things of Maeterlinck's with Mr. Brett, and incidentally ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... speaker concluded his address by reciting a passage from Wordsworth. [Or] The address was concluded by the recitation of a ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... "that there is a profundity of meaning in those words, 'Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein,' that we have not yet fathomed. I suspect Wordsworth is not far astray when he suggests that with the passing years we grow away from the simplicity of our faith and the clearness of our vision. There is no doubt that to Rob, Jesus is as real ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... contemplation of the literari we have amused ourselves with philosophic reflection. We recalled that old saw of Oscar Wilde's (as George Moore says of something of Wordsworth's) about the artist tending always to reproduce his own type. And we thought what an excellent model to the illustrator of his own "Married Life of the Frederic Carrolls" Jesse Lynch Williams would have been. No name itself, it struck us, would be happier ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... vainly through the crannies at his back; how his body tingled all over with warmth, and it began to dawn upon him, with a sort of slow surprise, that the country was beautiful, the heather purple, and the far-away hills all marbled with sun and shadow. Wordsworth, in a beautiful passage of the 'Prelude,' has used this as a figure for the feeling struck in us by the quiet by-streets of London after the uproar of the great thoroughfares; and the comparison may be turned the other way ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a volume by Robert Burns, the national poet of Scotland, contained the outpouring of a passionate soul in musical verse, and in 1798, two years after his death, the victory of the romantic school was secured by the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, though its triumph was not confirmed ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... say, 'The single act is all that we demand.' Alas! such wisdom bids a creature fly Whose very sorrow is, that time hath shorn His natural wings. WORDSWORTH. ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... Pusey, Newman, Keble, and their compeers was in full force. The aesthetic reaction, represented on the Continent by Chateaubriand, Manzoni, and Victor Hugo, and in England by Walter Scott, Pugin, Ruskin, and above all by Wordsworth, came in to give strength to this barrier. Under the magic of the men who led in this reaction, cathedrals and churches, which in the previous century had been regarded by men of culture as mere barbaric masses of stone and mortar, to be masked without ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... several numbers of Cornhill Magazine. Specially pleased with an article on 'Wordsworth's Ethics,' ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... 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
... sword, the mad monk and the were-wolf; the age of Petrus Borel and MacKeat, as well as of Dumas and Hugo. Now the official poetry of our country was untouched by and ignorant of the virtues and excesses of 1830. Wordsworth's bolt was practically shot; Sir Walter was ending his glorious career; Shelley and Byron and Keats were dead, and the annus mirabilis of Coleridge was long gone by. Three young poets of the English-speaking ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart
... not written any more stories. The old ladies took a good deal of her time. And she had been studying. She wished she were going to school again; she should appreciate it so much more. She was reading the English essayists and Wordsworth, and learning about the ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... little mother, whose frightened eyes were fixed upon us, we announced our mutual discovery by a single movement of the hand, and walked quietly past without pausing. Not until we reached the open fields at the end did my comrade whisper, "a cuckoo," and our hearts, if not our lips, sang with Wordsworth, "Thrice welcome, darling of the spring," for the nest of this shy bird we hardly ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... latter, for my soul's good." 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 ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... 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, ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... show'd; And 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 ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Never again must spiritual, moral, artistic culture be submerged under a wave of barbarism. Never again must the Ruler of this Universe be addressed as the "God of battles." Never again shall a new Wordsworth hail "carnage" as "God's daughter." The illogicality of it all is too patent. That everything which we respect and revere in the way of science or thought, or culture, or music, or poetry, or drama, should be cast into the melting-pot to satisfy dynastic ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... Wordsworth, and the other poets I have named, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, made such a protest against authority in poetry as had been made in the 16th century against authority in religion; and for this authority were substituted the soul-experiences of the individual poet, who set his verse ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... or four of those books to which it is well to give ten minutes every morning, before going down into the battle and choking dust of the day. Men will name these books for themselves. One will choose the Bible, another Goethe, one the Imitation of Christ, another Wordsworth. Perhaps it matters little what it be, so long as your writer has cheerful seriousness, elevation, calm, and, above all, a sense of size and strength, which shall open out the day before you and bestow ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 1: On Popular Culture • John Morley
... of the picturesque which before they had looked for in Italy and Southern France. We use "picturesque" now in a slightly derogatory sense, or we use it patronizingly, because it is old-fashioned and belongs to the nineteenth century, and Ruskin and Wordsworth, and even Horace Walpole and his "Gothic" ruin on Strawberry Hill; and we are of the twentieth century, and have discovered the beauty of docks and harbours and tall factory chimneys and railway stations, under the guidance of Whistler and Brangwyn and such folk, ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... which we seek. Our minds, too, are prepared to sympathise with the inanimate world; we have learned to look on the universe as a whole, and ourselves as a part of it, related by close ties of friendship to all its other members Shelley's, Wordsworth's, Goethe's poetry has taught us this; we are all more or less Pantheists, worshippers of 'God in Nature,' convinced of the omnipresence ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... " like - but oh! how different! " [Wordsworth]; " genius borrows nobly " [Emerson]; " pursuing echoes calling 'mong the rocks " [A. Coles]; " quotation confesses inferiority " [Emerson]; "Imitation is the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Language more frantically inflated, and deeds more farcically abject, surely were never before united. It seems therefore strange, that a difference, even thus far, should exist between Englishmen standing upon the same facts, starting from the sane principles. But perhaps, as regards Mr Wordsworth, he did not allow enough for the long series of noxious influences under which Spain had suffered. And this, at any rate, is notorious—he spoke of the Spanish people, the original stock (unmodified by courtly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... those delicious days in early autumn when earth and sky and air and all things in nature seem kindly allied to help the heart of man leap up in gladness and to enable him to understand how there came to be a poet called Wordsworth. Meadow-larks were singing in the grass, and once in an old hedgerow over-grown with sweet-smelling wild honeysuckle I saw a covey of young quails. These hedgerows of locust and cedar are broken now, but along the ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... from Cowper, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and the many other poets who have contributed to superstitious lore, would swell this portion of our work (The Poets and Superstition) to an undue proportion; and therefore we take leave of the poets, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... arrival, "that now he knew he was at Abbotsford." He lingered for two months, during which he recognised and spoke kindly to friends, and was even pleased in listening to passages read from the poems of Crabbe and Wordsworth: till, on September 21st, 1832, he died, apparently free from pain, and surrounded ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... cries Browning, in his "Lost Leader," while lamenting the defection of Wordsworth from the ranks of progress and liberalism—"Milton was for us, Burns, Shelley were with us—they watch from their graves!" There can, indeed, be no question of the fidelity to democracy of Milton, the republican pamphleteer, nor of Burns, the proud plowman, who proclaimed the fact ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy |
