William Wordsworth

"What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them."

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart"

"Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts. If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve."

"Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,And has the nature of infinity."

"But trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home."

"The child is the father of the man."

"But thou art with us, with us in the past,The present, with us in the times to come. There is no grief, no sorrow, no despair,No languor, no dejection, no dismay,No absence scarcely can there be, for those Who love as we do. Speed thee well!"

"Society has parted man from man, neglectful of the universal heart."

"A simple child. That lightly draws its breath. And feels its life in every limb. What should it know of death?"

"Rest and be thankful."

"This is the way in which he (poet) did his work. He used to go out with a pencil and a tablet and note what struck him...and make a picture out of it... But Nature does not allow an inventory to be made of her charms! He should have left his pencil behind, and gone forth in a meditative spirit; and, on a later day, he should have embodied in verse not all that he had noted but what he best remembered of the scene; and he would have then presented us with its soul, and not with the mere visual aspect of it."

"...books are yours, Within whose silent chambers treasure lies Preserved from age to age; more precious far Than that accumulated store of gold And orient gems, which, for a day of need, The Sultan hides deep in ancestral tombs. These hoards of truth you can unlock at will:"

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."

"One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can."

"She was a Phantom of delight When first she gleam'd upon my sight;A lovely Apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament:Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair;But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful dawn;A dancing shape, an image gay,To haunt, to startle, and waylay."

"Lines Written In Early Spring I heard a thousand blended notes,While in a grove I sate reclined,In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind. To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran;And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man. Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;And 'tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes. The birds around me hopped and played,Their thoughts I cannot measure:--But the least motion which they made It seemed a thrill of pleasure. The budding twigs spread out their fan,To catch the breezy air;And I must think, do all I can,That there was pleasure there. If this belief from heaven be sent,If such be Nature's holy plan,Have I not reason to lament What man has made of man?"

"Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,Are a substantial world, both pure and good:Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,Our pastime and our happiness will grow."

"When from our better selves we have too long Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,How gracious, how benign, is Solitude"

"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 forgetfulness,And not in utter nakedness,But trailing clouds of glory do we come"

"Nature never did betray The heart that loved her."