"Wordsworth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Wordsworth loved the pleasant region of the Quantock hills, you know, and wrote some charming poems while he and Coleridge lived at Nether Stowey and Alforden; but just to see, in passing, Nether Stowey looks unattractive; and as for Bridgewater, not much farther on (where a red road has turned ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... sad 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 ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... said Mrs. Bryant; "he will succeed at anything he may undertake. But that poem—why, Wordsworth never wrote anything half so grand or beautiful. What is ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... Bible, with concordance complete for study purposes, a set of Shakespeare in small, easily handled volumes, a set of encyclopaedias, and a standard dictionary. Then some of the best known poets—Milton, Spenser, Pope, Goldsmith, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, the Brownings, Byron, Homer, Dante, etc., with Longfellow, Riley, and some others of our best-loved American poets—for though we may not care for poetry we cannot afford to deny ourselves its elevating influence; standard ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... etc.: See Plato, Phaedo, 72 E-73 B. The notion that the souls of men existed before the bodies with which they are connected has been held in all ages and has often found expression in literature. The English poets have not infrequently alluded to it. See Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from the Recollections of Early Childhood, 'Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting' etc.; also, in Tennyson's Two Voices ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... 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 ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... you would be at least seven," cried the mistress of the house, "and with all the pertinacity of Wordsworth's little girl." ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... spirit as a business and sift its product for hire, is to overwork the vein and palm off slag for sterling metal. Shakespeare was a theater-manager, Milton a secretary, Bobby Burns a farmer, Lamb a bookkeeper, Wordsworth a government employee, Emerson a lecturer, Hawthorne a custom-house inspector, and Whitman a clerk. William Morris was a workingman and a manufacturer, and would have been Poet Laureate of England had he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... elisions, strained metaphors, and incomplete expressions are multiplied. The difficulty of comprehending the sense is rather increased than diminished, and the obstacles to a translator become still more insurmountable than Wordsworth found them.[413] This being undoubtedly the case, the value of Guasti's edition for students of Michael Angelo is nevertheless inestimable. We read now for the first time what the greatest man of the sixteenth century ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... whose cadences are as remembered music, and the couplets whose chime rings out from the depths of the heart; whatever the old English dramatists, the ode writers of the reign of Anne and Charles, the purest disciples of heroic verse, the Lakists, the Byronic school—Wordsworth and Dryden, Mrs. Hemans and Scott, Shakespeare and Hartley Coleridge have made precious to soul and sense, are herein brought together; and more than this—the many isolated single notes, whose lingering harmony embalms their ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... passed away as a day is done, and a new development of human experience is about to present itself, was over in literature. The romantic period had succeeded the classic. Scott, Coleridge, Southey (Wordsworth stands alone), Byron, Shelley, Keats, Campbell, Moore, were all in the field as poets, carrying the young world with them, and replacing their immediate predecessors, Cowper, Thompson, Young, Beattie, and ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... visage with its liquid embrace. The countenance is there—down there in the depth of the mirror. True, it shines radiant out of it, but it is not the shining out of it that Paul has in his thought; it is the fact—the visual fact, which, according to Wordsworth, the poet always seizes—of the mirror holding in it ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... harvest of it brought forth with steam-whistling. You will have no prophet's voice accompanied by that shepherd's pipe, and pastoral symphony. Do you know that lately, in Cumberland, in the chief pastoral district of England—in Wordsworth's own home—a procession of villagers on their festa day provided for themselves, by way of music, a steam-plough whistling at the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... matter to speak of infelicities of diction in a book so justly famous as the Prayer Book for its pure and wholesome English. Wordsworth's curse on ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... little. No, Dele had 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 great men ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... I have 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
... he said, "and Burns's country, and go to Shakespeare's home. And you shall coach among the English lakes where Wordsworth learned to write. Then there is Rome, on her seven hills, you know, and the canals of Venice and the Dutch windmills and the Black Forest. You shall hear the legends of all the historic rivers you cross and mountains you climb, and listen to the music ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... boots—was familiar in all her highways and byways. His mellow voice, shot with humorous undertones even when he was serious, touched with equal readiness upon Plato, the habits of bees, the growth of fungus, fashions, Wordsworth, the Civil War, or the construction of chimneys. He was something of a philosopher, something of a poet, ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... 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
... popular, and in which fifty years ago they were much rarer than they are now. At this time Keswick and its vicinities were beginning to be known as the abodes of poets, and Thomas Thwaite was acquainted with Southey and Wordsworth. He was an intelligent, up-standing, impulsive man, who thought well of his own position in the world, and who could speak his mind. He was tall, massive, and square; tender-hearted and very generous; and ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... (O, muse forbid!) the boon Of borrowed notes, the mock-bird's modish tune, The jingling medley of purloined conceits Out-babying Wordsworth, and out-glittering Keats, Where all the airs of patchwork pastoral chime To drown ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... well, and a draw-well, to your sorrow and mine, and it seldom overflows, but," looking with that strange power of tenderness as if he put his voice and his heart into his eyes, "you may always come hither to draw;" he used to say he might take to himself Wordsworth's lines,— ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... concert-rooms by gaslight; and take decent care of your own health; and dress not like a "Parisienne"—nor, of course, like Nausicaa of old, for that is to ask too much:—but somewhat more like an average Highland lassie; and try to look like her, and be like her, of whom Wordsworth sang— ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... poetry of Wordsworth is a true reflex of the man himself. The life of Wordsworth was not outwardly eventful, but his inner life was full of conflict, discovery, and progress. His outward life seems to have been so ordered by Providence as to favour the development of the poetic life within. Educated in the country, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... constructions; he surprises us with curious mysteries and imaginations we have never dreamed of before. Now and then, however, even in English literature, instances arise of the opposite—the Racinesque—method. In these lines of Wordsworth, for example— ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... of Glasgow University wished, in 1846, to do him honour, Lord John gracefully begged them to appoint as Lord Rector a man of creative genius, like Wordsworth, rather than himself. As Prime Minister he honoured science by selecting Sir John Herschel as Master of the Mint, and literature, by the recommendation of Alfred Tennyson as Poet Laureate. When Sir Walter Scott was creeping ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... captives at the chariot-wheels of the sun, and smitten here and there into reluctant splendour by his beams, and think of all the gorgeous descriptions of sunset and its momentary miracles to be found in Scott, Byron, Wilson, Croly, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge; or he can from some mighty Ben look abroad over a country—Scotland, and the sea below, the blue heaven above, till, in his enthusiasm, he might deem that he could lay his one hand on the mane of the ocean, and his other on the tresses of the ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... capital (which, fortunately, is seldom so large as we suppose), but the love of Nature is a sure investment, which she repays a thousand-fold, which she repays most prodigally when the heart is bankrupt and full of bitterness, as Ruth's heart was that day. For in Nature, as Wordsworth says, "there is no bitterness," that worst sting of human grief. And as Ruth walked among the quiet fields, and up the yellow aisles of the autumn glades to Arleigh, Nature spoke of peace to her—not of joy or of happiness as in old days, for she never lies as human comforters do, and these ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... and its sorrow, are not heightened by those efforts of the fancy which delight us in dramatic authors?—that its simplicity is bald, and its naturalness rough?—that its excessive familiarity repels taste and disturbs culture? If we may trust Wordsworth, simplicity is not inconsistent with the pleasures of the imagination. The style of the Bible is not redundant,—there is little extravagance in it, and it has no trickery of words. Yet this does not prevent its being deep in sentiment, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... and affecting poem was printed in the Kilmarnock edition: Wordsworth writes with his usual taste and feeling about it: "Whom did the poet intend should be thought of, as occupying that grave, over which, after modestly setting forth the moral discernment and warm affections of the 'poor inhabitant' it is ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... apocalypse, and cries for 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... on the great body of poets of the generation succeeding his own was very considerable—Mr. Watts-Dunton indeed declares him to have been the father of the New Romantic School—and the affection with which Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and many others regarded him was extraordinary. He was their pioneer, who had lost his life in a heroic attempt to penetrate the dull crassness of the ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... he [Wordsworth] mingled freely with all kinds of men, he found a pith of sense and a solidity of judgment here and there among the unlearned which he had failed to find in the most lettered; from obscure men he heard high truths.... And love, true love and pure, he ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... reached Rothieden the events of the night began to wear the doubtful aspect of a dream. No allusion was made to what had occurred while Robert slept; but all the journey Ericson felt towards Miss St. John as Wordsworth felt towards the leech-gatherer, ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... youthful genius then at Cambridge, with whom some notable Royston men were afterwards to come in contact. That glorious dream, in which the French Revolution had its birth, had burnt itself into the very soul of young Wordsworth who found ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... told me in the most open way. Like Wordsworth's "simple child," what could she know of death? But being a villager myself I was better informed than Wordsworth, and didn't enter on a ponderous argument to prove to her that when people die they die, and being dead, ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... find it to describe Mrs. Beuland; I wish I could picture to you this most unusual woman as I knew her in the southland, a mere girl of sixteen; as I think of her now she brings to my mind a poem of William Wordsworth: ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... sympathise with sublime or rugged scenery, was not in the spirit of the Renaissance. Humanity occupied the attention of poets and painters; and the age was yet far distant when the pantheistic feeling for the world should produce the art of Wordsworth and of Turner. Yet a few great natures even then began to comprehend the charm and mystery which the Greeks had imaged in their Pan, the sense of an all-pervasive spirit in wild places, the feeling of a hidden want, the invisible tie which makes man a ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... 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
... Jeremy Taylor, too, it may be remembered, was locking up the treasures of his richly-furnished mind and passionate feeling within the walls of those same Welsh hills. Nature, alone, however, is inadequate to the production of a true poet. Even Wordsworth, the most patient, absorbed of recluses, had his share of education in London and travel in foreign cities. Vaughan, too, early found his way, in visits, to the metropolis, where he heard at the Globe Tavern the last echoes of that burst of wit and knowledge which had ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... then moved into a furnished house. 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 ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... regarding his mother's death: "It is my prayer to God that she may abide in eternal happiness in heaven."[116] Generations of Hindu students I have known to find pleasure in identifying themselves with Wordsworth's views of immortality: ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... must have told you that one of my privileges has been to see Wordsworth twice. He was very kind to me, and let me hear his conversation. I went with him and Miss Mitford to Chiswick, and thought all the way that I must certainly be dreaming. I saw her almost every day of her week's visit to London (this was all long ago, while ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... of the peasant, so is that of his wife or sweetheart. She shares in the work, guiding the oxen, cutting grass, even working on the road with hoe and basket. "Verse sweetens toil, however rude the sound." Like Wordsworth's reaper, she sings as she works, and the day's labor over is ready to join in the bolero. On fete-days she is arrayed in all the magnificence of her peasant ornaments, worth, if her family is well-to-do, a hundred dollars or more—gold ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... in English Literature. What an exquisite work it is, and how adequately it embodies his conceptions of Pantheism! The Romantic movement of the early part of the last century, exemplified in the works of such poets as Shelley, Byron, Keats, and Wordsworth, appeals to me very much more than the Classical period that preceded it. Speaking of poetry, have you ever read that charming little thing of ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... a contributor of critical articles for his friend Mr. Jeffrey, the elder. His chief work was now on "Sir Tristram," a romance ascribed to Thomas of Ercildoune; but "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" was making progress in 1803, when Scott made the acquaintance of Wordsworth and his sister, under circumstances described by Dorothy Wordsworth in her Journal. In the following May, he took a lease of the house of Ashestiel, with an adjoining farm, on the southern bank of the Tweed, a few miles from Selkirk; and in the same ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... opposition, and have been a favorite from the first. Lamb's "Rosamond Gray" was published in 1798, and for two years was not even reviewed. His poems appeared during the same year. In 1815 he introduced Talfourd to Wordsworth as his own "only admirer." In 1819 the series of "Essays of Elia" began, and Shelley wrote to Leigh Hunt that year: "When I think of such a mind as Lamb's, when I see how unnoticed remain things of such exquisite and complete perfection, what should I hope for myself, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... which memory can pass. They were like ignes fatui, flashing up from dank caverns and dying out while I looked upon them. As I grew older I found strange confirmation in those curious passages of Coleridge and Wordsworth, [Footnote: Coleridge's "Sonnet on the Birth of a Son." Wordsworth's "Ode—Intimations of Immortality."] and continually I propound to my soul these questions: 'If you are immortal, and will exist through endless ages, have you not existed from the beginning of time? Immortality knows neither ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... Poetry, 'the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,' according to Wordsworth, the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science'—that poetry irrespective of rhyme and metrical arrangement which is as immortal as the heart of man, is distinctive in Mr. Allen's work from the first written page. Like Minerva issuing ...
— James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... drew; I promised to give her a signature of Mrs. Hemans (which I wrote for her that very evening); and described a fox-hunt, at which I had seen Thomas Moore and Samuel Rogers, Esquires; and a boxing-match, in which the athletic author of "Pelham" was pitched against the hardy mountain bard, Wordsworth. You see my education was not neglected, for though I have never read the works of the above-named ladies and gentlemen, yet I ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 last one hundred and fifty years. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... buy, and the best company she can get. She pays the debts of that scamp of a husband of hers. She spoils her boy like the most virtuous mother in England. Her opinion about literary matters, to be sure, is not much; and I daresay she never read a line of Wordsworth, or heard of ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... does not know what causes there may be to prevent her from doing as she would wish in such a case. I think Mr. Smith will not object to my occasionally sending her any of the Cornhill books that she may like to see. I have already taken the liberty of lending her Wordsworth's Prelude, as she was saying how much she wished to have the ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Trinity College, Cambridge. His first volume of poems appeared in 1830; it made little impression, and was severely treated by the critics. On the publication of his third series, in 1842, his poetic genius began to receive general recognition. On the death of Wordsworth he was made poet laureate, and he was then regarded as the foremost living poet of England. "In Memoriam," written in memory of his friend Arthur Hallam, appeared in 1850; the "Idyls of the King," in 1858; and "Enoch Arden," a touching story in verse, from which the following selection is taken, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... echoes with luxurious sweetness in my ears, from some unaccountable hide-and- seek of fugitive childish memories; just as a marine shell, if applied steadily to the ear, awakens (according to the fine image of Landor [Footnote: 'Of Landor,' viz., in his 'Gebir;' but also of Wordsworth in 'The Excursion.' And I must tell the reader, that a contest raged at one time as to the original property in this image, not much less keen than that between Neptune and Minerva, for the chancellorship of Athens.]) the great vision of ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... "foe"—that, in fact, to many minds, the unfamiliar is, as we said, eo ipso the suspect. But immanence means nothing more abstruse than "indwelling"; and the renewed emphasis which, from the time of Wordsworth onward, began to be laid upon the Divine indwelling, the presence of God in the Universe, represented in the first place the reaction of the human spirit against the cold and formal Deism of the eighteenth century, which thought of God as remote, external to the world, exclusively ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... continued: "What about the present-day poets?" Swift came the reply, "We have got none." This was a staggerer, but I suggested: "What about Kipling?" "Too slangy and Coarse!" "Austin?" "Don't ask me." "What of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning?" "Well, Wordsworth is too prosy, you have to read such a lot to get a little; Tennyson is a bit sickly and too sentimental, I mean with washy sentiment; Browning I cannot understand, he ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... 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 ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... one finds after much groping about dim halls at Cambridge. A highly individual personality! It is this personality, though, that makes the fascination of Poets and Pilgrims—a volume of studies in which the subjects are Spenser, Milton, Evelyn, Bunyan, Boswell, Crabbe, Wordsworth and Carlyle. Mr. Glover notes at the foot of the table of contents: "An acute young critic, who saw some of the proofs, has asked me, with a hint of irony, whether Evelyn and Boswell were Puritans or Poets. Any reader who has a conscience about the matter must omit these ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... out. "All of you, but in different ways, are slaves to an old tradition kept up by Wordsworth, who would himself, doubtless, have moved to London except for the steepness of the rents. You all maintain that you like the country, yet on one excuse or another you live in the city and growl about it. There isn't a commuter ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... London that Dickens knew clung somewhat to Wordsworth's happy description written but a ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... of 'Italy,' and listened or added his own contributions to the exuberant riches of the hour, when such visitors as Talfourd, Dickens, Moore, and Landor were the talkers." He also formed a warm friendship with Wordsworth, and, during his stay in Edinburgh, with Professor Wilson and De Quincey. The writings of the last-named author were published by Ticknor and Fields, in eighteen volumes, and were edited by Mr. Fields, ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... terribly expressed it. Shelley, it is true, died by accident, and Chatterton by poison, but suicide is in itself a sign of a morbid state. It is true that Rogers lived to be almost a centenarian, but he was banker first and poet afterwards. Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning have all raised the average age of the poets, but for some reason the novelists, especially of late years, have a deplorable record. They will end by being scheduled with the white-lead workers and other dangerous trades. Look at the really shocking case ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... beard that suggested the Confederate officer—used to have Page to tea at least twice a week and at these meetings the young man was first introduced in an understanding way to Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and the other writers who became the literary passions of his maturer life. And Price did even more for Page; he passed him on to another place and to another teacher who extended his horizon. Up to the autumn of 1876 Page had never gone farther North than Ashland; he was still a Southern ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... have been repeated to the ears of our generation with wearisome iteration. Not the least of the good luck of Wordsworth and Coleridge lay in the fact that they scarcely knew that they were "romanticists." Middle-aged readers of the present day may congratulate themselves that in their youth they read Wordsworth and ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... efforts give no promise whatever of that poetical genius which produced at once 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 of predecessors, but they give no assurances ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... patched the older stems. Neither horses nor dogs say to themselves, I suppose, that the sunshine makes them glad, yet both are happier, after the rules of equine and canine existence, on a bright day: neither Helen nor George could have understood a poem of Keats—not to say Wordsworth—(I do not mean they would not have fancied they did)—and yet the soul of nature that dwelt in these common shows did not altogether ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... they didn't," Lord Henry replied. "Hence, too, the ridiculous present-day exaltation of childhood, because children are stupidly supposed to trail 'clouds of glory' from whence they come, as that old spinster Wordsworth assures us. In fact everything immature or uncultivated is supposed to be sacrosanct. Of course that young man, Denis Malster, must be a sentimentalist, too, and he probably wants kicking badly; but it is not ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... really a mere "conceit" is mere decoration. We often deceive ourselves in this matter, for what we call decoration has often a new and genuinely poetic content of its own; but wherever there is mere decoration, we judge the poetry to be not wholly poetic. And so when Wordsworth inveighed against poetic diction, though he hurled his darts rather wildly, what he was rightly aiming at was a phraseology, not the living body of a new content, but the mere worn-out ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... [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 ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... presences, as distinguished from forms and colours and all analyzed sources of her influences—should have already become a conscious thing to himself requires to account for it the fact that his master, Graham, was already under the influences of Wordsworth, whom he had hailed as a Crabbe that had burst his shell and spread the wings of an eagle the virtue passed from him ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... of armed millions. 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 ambition is a thing too puerile ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney
... interest. Many things, however, are so universal that one cares not whether they were written by a Hindoo or an American, whether they are full of personal experience or drawn with the fervor of the most ardent imagination. Wordsworth's Daffodils (Volume VII, page 1) would charm us and our hearts would dance as joyfully if we knew nothing of the pensive ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... England over which George III. ruled. The hope was a robust but pedestrian "mental traveller," and its limbs wore the precise garments of political formulae. It looked for honest Parliaments and manhood suffrage, for the triumph of democracy and the abolition of war. Its scene as Wordsworth put it, was ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... ripe blood that swells his purple veins Is as the glowing of a sacred fire. He walks with Shelley's spirit on the cliffs Of the Ethereal Caucasus, and o'er The summits of the Euganean hills; And meets the soul of Wordsworth, in profound And philosophic meditation, rapt In some great dream of love towards The human race. The cheery Spring may come, And touch the dreaming flowers into life, Summer expand her leafy sea of green, And wake the joyful wilderness ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... its comparative finish, like tapioca imitating pearls. Either view—possibly both—may be right. I will only say that with an occasional exception for some piece of rebelliousness or even levity which may have taken my fancy, I have tried to choose no verse but such as in Wordsworth's phrase ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... struggling youth merged into an easy middle-age, and late years found him in comfortable circumstances, with a solid reputation as an artist, and a solid retiring-allowance from a princely patron, whose house he had served for the better part of his working career. Like Goethe and Wordsworth, he lived out all his life. He was no Marcellus, shown for one brief moment and "withdrawn before his springtime had brought forth the fruits of summer." His great contemporary, Mozart, cut off while yet his light was crescent, is known to posterity only ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... doubt of the bent of his mind from the whole strain of his writings,' said Guy. 'So again with Spenser; and as to Milton, though his religion was not quite the right sort, no one can pretend to say he had it not. Wordsworth, Scott—' ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... those New Smyrna live-oaks, nor to see again all that beauty of the Hillsborough. And yet, in a truer and better sense of the word, I do see it, and shall. What a heavenly light falls at this moment on the river and the island woods! Perhaps we must come back to Wordsworth, after all,— ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... introduced a wide variety into English poetry; and yet we have but to examine the selected jewels strung into so exquisite a carcanet by Mr. Palgrave in his "Golden Treasury" to notice with surprise how close a family likeness exists between the contributions of Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron. The distinctions of style, of course, are very great; but the general character of the diction, the imagery, even of the rhythm, is more or less identical. The stamp of the same age is ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... a great deal of pleasure from books," he went on. "Bachelor. Marvelous solace. May know Wordsworth's famous lines, eh? 'Books we know are a substantial world,' etc. Perhaps you have read something of ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... 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 examples of men ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... which had been hungrily read by all the members of the family, was sometimes in such a condition that the bedroom shelf was considered its fitting place. Up and down the house were to be found many standard works of a solid kind. Sir Walter Scott's writings, Wordsworth's and Southey's poems were among the lighter literature; while, as having a character of their own—earnest, wild, and occasionally fanatical—may be named some of the books which came from the Branwell side of the family—from the Cornish followers of the saintly John Wesley—and which are touched ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... myself, I even forgot the book on my knee—everything but that hour in the past—a view of shimmering hot housetops, the heat and dust and noise of an August evening in the city, the dumb weariness of it all, the loneliness, the longing for green fields; and then these great lines of Wordsworth, read for the first ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... his wife made it desirable to seek a purer air than that of the factory district, and in the spring of 1842 they settled in a charming spot at the foot of Wansfell—the hill that rises to the southeast above Ambleside, and was sung by Wordsworth in one of his ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 7: A Sketch • John Morley
... is free to confess that he does not admire Gray's 'Elegy,' and Macaulay to avow that he sees little to praise in Dickens and Wordsworth, why should not humbler folks have the courage of their own opinions? They cannot possibly be more wrong than Johnson and Macaulay were, and it is surely better to be honest, though it may expose one to some ridicule, than to lie. The more we agree with the verdict of the generations ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... 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 ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... needed of works so well known as "La Petite Fadette," "La Mare au Diable," and "Francois le Champi." Like Wordsworth, with the inward eye she sees into the life of ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... "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 ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... I wasted my time with the encyclopedia. I got interested in the articles on Wages, Warts, Weather, Wordsworth, and Worms. By the time I got to Wolverhampton it was closing time. I did just seize the information that the town was founded in 996 by Wulfruna, widow of the Earl of Northampton. Then ...
— Kathleen • Christopher Morley
... remarkable 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 field-flowers—the celandine and daisy and daffodil—as well as by ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... 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 child-faced ...
— Sonnets, and Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 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." Perhaps the most striking view in this part of Dorset ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... Nature brings. Our meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous forms of things. We murder to dissect. Enough of Science and of Art: Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives."—WORDSWORTH. ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... black fur as marked as ever. Puss is the observed of all observers who visit that sacred shrine, and it is said she seems specially to enjoy the attention of strangers. From here Miss Anthony drove round Grasmere, the romantic home of Wordsworth, wandered through the old church, sat in the pew he so often occupied and lingered near the last resting-place of the great poet. As the former residence of the anti-slavery agitator, Thomas Clarkson, was on Ulswater, another of the beautiful lakes in that region, Miss Anthony extended her excursion ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... The old English muse was frank, guileless, sincere, and although very learned, still learned without art. No general error evinces a more thorough confusion of ideas than the error of supposing Donne and Cowley metaphysical in the sense wherein Wordsworth and Coleridge are so. With the two former ethics were the end-with the two latter the means. The poet of the "Creation" wished, by highly artificial verse, to inculcate what he supposed to be moral truth-the poet of the "Ancient Mariner" to infuse the Poetic Sentiment ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... fall into pagan hands he tries to break it in pieces, and the mighty slashes he made in the rocks are still pointed out as the "Breche de Roland." You remember Wordsworth's lines: ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... 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 pretext that some of the trees were showing signs of decay, ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... 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 only from ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... chapter I find many pages of information concerning Shakespeare's plays, Milton's works, and those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope, Swift, Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Hood, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli—a fact which shows that into the restricted stomach of the public-school ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 of religious poetry. The century ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... in a torpid state in their beds or in their arm-chairs at home. So in this way, I am absent. My soul whisks away thirty years back into the past. I am looking out anxiously for a beard. I am getting past the age of loving Byron's poems, and pretend that I like Wordsworth and Shelley much better. Nothing I eat or drink (in reason) disagrees with me; and I know whom I think to be the most lovely creature in the world. Ah, dear maid (of that remote but well-remembered period), are you a wife or widow now?—are you dead?—are you thin and withered ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... volcano, with its green base and frozen rivers and dark, glimmering lines of carbon, seemed like a fairy tale, a celestial vision, an ascent to some city of crystal and pearl in the sky. To her foster mother the stupendous scene was merely a worthless waste, as to Wordsworth's unspiritual wanderer: ...
— The Log School-House on the Columbia • Hezekiah Butterworth
... friends, and remanded to Oxford. There he formed a friendship with Christopher North, which has continued unimpaired to this hour. Both—besides the band of kindred genius—had that of profound admiration, then a rare feeling, for the poetry of Wordsworth. In the course of this part of his life he visited Ireland, and was introduced soon afterward to OPIUM—fatal friend, treacherous ally—root of that tree called Wormwood, which has overshadowed all his after life. A blank here occurs in his history. We find ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... our hearts will make, Which they shall long obey; We for the year to come may take Our temper from to-day."—WORDSWORTH. ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... especially Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. If we include within the sphere of Spenser's influence also those who have made use of the stanza which he invented, we must add the names of Burns, Shelley, Byron, Beattie, Campbell, Scott, and Wordsworth. When we consider the large number of poets in whom Spenser awakened the poetic gift, or those to whose powers he gave direction, we may safely pronounce him the most ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... conceivable horror could provoke. With all our perverse nonsense as to John Smith living for a thousand million eons and for ever after, we die voluntarily, knowing that it is time for us to be scrapped, to be remanufactured, to come back, as Wordsworth divined, trailing ever brightening clouds of glory. We must all be born again, and yet again and again. We should like to live a little longer just as we should like 50 pounds: that is, we should take it if we could get it for nothing; but that sort of idle ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... of 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, condemned: ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... all the exultation of the proudest cavalier who partakes the amusement. Let any one who has witnessed the sight recall to his imagination the vigour and lively interest which he has seen inspired into a village, including the oldest and feeblest of its inhabitants. In the words of Wordsworth, it ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... author of 'Essays in Criticism' telling two worlds that Emerson's 'Essays' are the most valuable prose contributions to the literature of the century, his soul is indeed filled 'with an unutterable sense of lamentation and mourning and woe.' Mr. Arnold's silence was once felt to be provoking. Wordsworth's lines kept ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... descriptions and narratives are only one-tenth matter to nine-tenths spirit. The results that follow from one external act of folly or crime are to him enough for an Iliad of woes. It might be supposed that his whole theory of Romantic Art was based on these tremendous lines of Wordsworth:— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... address him in long familiar letters, such as were likely to interest a shepherd-bard. Unfortunately, these letters have been lost; it was a peculiarity of Hogg to be careless in regard to his correspondence. With Wordsworth he became acquainted in the summer of 1815, when that poet was on his first visit to Edinburgh. They met at the house, in Queen Street, of the mother of his friend Wilson; and the Shepherd was at once interested and gratified by the intelligent conversation and agreeable manners ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of what will interest others. There are few of our poets of rare genius, of whose private life and character much is known. Little is known of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton: not much even of Thomson. More is known of Gray by the medium of his beautiful letters; but when Southey, Wordsworth, and Scott are gone, posterity will know every particular of them; and, even now, know much which fills them with delight and admiration. But let us know something in good time, also of the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... 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 to Browning's The Ring and the Book, is concerned with no other subject. ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... and more his own is the invocation in the "Prioress's Tale." I give the stanzas as modernized by Wordsworth:— ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... his tragic death are commemorated by Shelley in Adonais, by Wordsworth in "Resolution and Independence," by Coleridge in "A Monody on the Death of Chatterton," by D.G. Rossetti in "Five English Poets," and John Keats inscribed Endymion "to the memory of Thomas Chatterton." Alfred de Vigny's drama of Chatterton ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... 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 forgetfulness, Nor yet in utter nakedness, ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... Haydon: Correspondence and Table Talk, with a Memoir by his son Frederic Wordsworth ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... countenance of living nature could calm the mind which this theology had irritated to the very borders of madness, and give a peace and hope which the man was altogether right in attributing to the Spirit of God. How many have been thus comforted, who knew not, like Wordsworth, the immediate channel of their comfort; or even, with Cowper, recognized its source! ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... forest, should be not felt only, but seen to rejoice along with them. It is not the truth; between us and our environment, whatever links there are, this link is wanting. But the yearning for it, the passion which made Wordsworth cry out for something, even were it the imagination of a pagan which would make him 'less forlorn,' is natural to man; and simplicity leaps at the lovely fiction of a response. Just here is the opportunity for such alliances between spiritualism and superstition as are the daily ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... a feast after the Homeric fashion. A sheep was "cut," disembowelled, dismembered, tossed into one of our huge caldrons, and devoured within the hour: the almost live food [25] was washed down with huge draughts of milk. The feasters resembled Wordsworth's cows, "forty feeding like one:" in the left hand they held the meat to their teeth, and cut off the slice in possession with long daggers perilously close, were their noses longer and their mouths less obtrusive. During the dinner I escaped ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... dead, even though his ghost may walk and gibber once or twice. The sweet urge of the new season has rippled up through the oceanic depths of our subconsciousness, and we are aware of the rising tide. Like Mr. Wordsworth we feel that we are wiser than we know. (Perhaps we have misquoted that, but ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... 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, till at last they passed into an ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... poet; Macready's opinion of the poem; 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 ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... that path. And the folk were walking in these various ages and among these different peoples humbly along the same road, which their geniuses travelled. Of the great modern writers and poets, the author notes especially Wordsworth, through whom the child was really born in our literature, the linker together of the child and the race; Rousseau, who told of childhood as "refuge from present evil, a mournful reminiscence of a lost Paradise, who (like St. Pierre) preached a return ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... English and Foreign; as Crete's and Chambers's Histories of Greece, Smith's Greek and Roman Antiquities, Thirlwall and Wordsworth's Greece, Smith's Mythology and Biography, Annals of Commerce, Library of Useful Knowledge, &c. With Questions to each Chapter, a Chronological Table, Index, and a coloured Map of the Greek States. Price 3s. bound ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... not destitute of what Wordsworth calls 'the poetry of common speech,' many of their similes being very forcibly and naturally drawn from objects familiarly in sight and quite Australian. 'Poor as a bandicoot,' 'miserable as a ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... in what is perhaps the most truly Italian in feeling of all his poems, "The Englishman in Italy!" For here with the rich imagination, worthy of some of Shelley's finest flights, is mingled an accurate appreciation of Nature, of which Wordsworth might well be proud; for the Lake poet himself could not have improved upon this exquisite description of the various shrubs and plants of a limestone ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... prolonged meditation, for the communing with one's innermost soul on the immense principles of life and nature, for the production of such deep soul-searching work as we see in the compositions of a Kempis, Dante, Milton, and Wordsworth, absolute solitude for some seasons is essential. There must be complete freedom from the daily distractions caused by ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... the Tories as the Edinburgh 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, and ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... some graduates of the universities to shame, and of an intellect so keen that had it not had a crook in it their fame would have crossed the county. Most of them had but a thread-bare existence, for you weave slowly with a Wordsworth open before you, and some were strange Bohemians (which does not do in Thrums), yet others wandered into the world and compelled it to recognize them. There is a London barrister whose father belonged to the club. Not many years ago a man ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... most benignant grace; Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon thy face; Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, And fragrance in thy footing treads; Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong; And the most ancient Heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong. —WORDSWORTH: Ode ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... 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 would not have disgraced the land of artists; while scholars, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... the business of writing verse is a very different thing on the gun-deck of a frigate, from what the gentle and sequestered Wordsworth found it at placid Rydal Mount in Westmoreland. In a frigate, you cannot sit down and meander off your sonnets, when the full heart prompts; but only, when more important duties permit: such as bracing round the yards, or reefing top-sails fore and aft. Nevertheless, ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... the erroneous use of the adverb while instead of the preposition in. "For my part I can not think that Shelley's poetry, except by snatches and fragments, has the value of the good work of Wordsworth or Byron."—Matthew Arnold. Should be, "except in snatches." "Taxes with us are collected nearly [almost] solely from real and personal estate."—"Appletons' Journal." Taxes are levied on estates and collected from ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... good-sized mats. There was a writing-table on one side of the room with an ebony-and-gold crucifix standing upon it. Opposite to it, on the other side of the room near the fireplace, was a bookcase. On the shelves were volumes of Shakespeare, Dante, Emerson, Wordsworth, Browning, Christina Rossetti, Newman's "Dream of Gerontius" and "Apologia," Thomas a Kempis, several works on mystics and mysticism, a life of St. Catherine of Genoa, another of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius Loyola's "Spiritual ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... marshes near Brunswick, Georgia. Early in life Lanier had been thrilled by this wonderful natural scenery, and later visits had the more powerfully impressed his imagination. He is the poet of the marshes as surely as Bryant is of the forests, or Wordsworth of the mountains. ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... as a work is beautiful, it contains at least one quality not possessed by other works, the quality that gives it its distinctive flavor,—which is, indeed, its beauty. The impressionist would admit, for example, that in intellectual power Keats's Eve of St. Agnes is inferior to Wordsworth's Intimations; also that it lacks the moral grandeur of the latter; but would claim, on the other hand, that in saying this, one is far from judging the beauty of Keats's poem, because that is completely lacking in Wordsworth. So far as the poem is beautiful, it is unique; hence you get ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... 'Works,' published in 1874-5. English philosophical thinking, so Green held, had stuck fast in the scepticism of Hume. Such forward movement in thought as there had been since the 18th Century, had come mainly through the writings of men like Wordsworth and Shelley—men who having seen deeply into life, had expressed themselves in imaginative, not in philosophical ways. To set the stagnant tide of speculative thinking in motion, involved a two-fold task: on one side ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... (1637) we have reached the high-water mark of English Poesy and of Milton's own production. A period of a century and a half was to elapse before poetry in England seemed, in Wordsworth's Ode on Immortality (1807), to be rising again towards the level of inspiration which it had once attained in Lycidas. And in the development of the Miltonic genius this wonderful dirge marks the culminating point. As the twin idylls ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... not always thus. "High deeds, O Germans, are to come from you," wrote Wordsworth in his "Sonnets dedicated to Liberty." And it throws light upon the nature of Missions to recall that when she lay at the feet of Napoleon after Jena, the mission proclaimed for her by Fichte was one of peace and righteousness—to penetrate the life of humanity by her religion—and ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... point out how this man attained to a moral excellence denied to his speculative contemporaries; performed duties from which they, good men as they were, would one and all have shrunk: how, in short, he contrived to achieve what no one of his friends, not even the immaculate Wordsworth or the precise Southey, achieved—the living of a life the records of which are inspiriting to read, and are indeed "the presence of a good diffused"; and managed to do it all without either "wrangling with or accepting" the opinions that "hurtled in the air" ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... happened, that those, the most interested to maintain the right of the king, namely Charles II., his brother the duke of York, and the two earls of Clarendon and Bristol, yielded to the deception. These difficulties, however, have not appalled Dr. Wordsworth, who in a recent publication of more than four hundred pages, entitled, "Who wrote[Greek: EIKON BASILIKAe]" has collected with patient industry every particle of evidence which can bear upon the subject; and after a most minute and laborious investigation, has concluded by adjudging the ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... he sat turning over Miss March's books, and reading either aloud or to himself fragments out of one—which I had expected he would have scouted, inasmuch as it was modern not classical poetry: in fact, a collection of Lyrical Ballads, brought out that year by a young man named Mr. William Wordsworth, and some anonymous friend, conjointly. I had opened it, and found therein great nonsense; but John had better luck—he hit upon a short poem called "Love," by the Anonymous Friend, which he read, and I listened to, almost as if it had been Shakspeare. It was about a girl named Genevieve—a little ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... idea from 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
... become a writer of fiction,—and he held fast to this determination in the face of most discouraging obstacles. He composed a series of short stories,—echoes of his academic years,—which he proposed to publish under the title of Wordsworth's popular poem, "We Are Seven." One of these is said to have been based on the witchcraft delusion, and it is a pity that it should not have been preserved, but their feminine titles afford no indication of ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... the health and buoyancy of twenty-one on to the very verge of forty, and seeming to grow younger-hearted as they grow older-headed, can cast off care and work at a moment's warning, laugh and frolic now as they did twenty years ago, and say with Wordsworth— ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley |
