Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Miscellaneous Sonnets. Part i. xxxiit.

Maidens withering on the stalk.1

Personal Talk. Stanza 1.

Sweetest melodies

Are those that are by distance made more sweet.2 Stanza 2.

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.

The gentle Lady married to the Moor,

And heavenly Una with her milk-white lamb.
Blessings be with them, and eternal praise,
Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares!
The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays.
A power is passing from the earth.

Stanza 3.

Ibid.

Stanza 4.

Lines on the expected Dissolution of Mr. Fox.

The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose.

Intimations of Immortality. Stanza 2.

The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,

That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

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
From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy.

1 See Shakespeare, page 57.

Ibid.

Stanza 5.

Stanza 5.

2 See Collins, page 390.

At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Ode. Intimations of Immortality. Stanza 5

The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction.

Those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings,
Blank misgivings of a creature

Moving about in worlds not realized,

High instincts before which our mortal nature

Stanza 9.

Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.

Ibid.

Truths that wake,

To perish never.

Ibid.

Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither.

Ibid.

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality.

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Two voices are there: one is of the sea,
One of the mountains, each a mighty voice.

Stanza 10.

Ibid.

Stanza 11.

Ibid.

Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland. Earth helped him with the cry of blood.'

Song at the Feast of Broughton Castle.

The silence that is in the starry sky.

Ibid

1 This line is from Sir John Beaumont's "Battle of Bosworth Field."

The monumental pomp of age
Was with this goodly personage;
A stature undepressed in size,
Unbent, which rather seemed to rise
In open victory o'er the weight
Of seventy years, to loftier height.

The White Doe of Rylstone. Canto iii.

"What is good for a bootless bene?"
With these dark words begins my tale;
And their meaning is, Whence can comfort spring
When prayer is of no avail ?

Force of Prayer.

A few strong instincts, and a few plain rules.

Alas! what boots the long laborious Quest!

Of blessed consolations in distress.

Preface to the Excursion. (Edition, 1814.)

The vision and the faculty divine;
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.

The Excursion. Bookt.

The imperfect offices of prayer and praise.
That mighty orb of song,

Ibid.

With battlements that on their restless fronts
Bore stars.

Ibid.

Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop

'Than when we soar.

Book iii.

1 Heaven gives its favourites - early death. - BYRON: Childe Harold, canto iv. stanza 102. Also Don Juan, canto iv. stanza 12.

Quem Di diligunt

Adolescens moritur

(He whom the gods favor dies in youth).

PLAUTUS: Bacchides, act iv. sc. 7.

Wrongs unredressed, or insults unavenged.

The Excursion. Book iii

Monastic brotherhood, upon rock

Aerial.

Ibid.

The intellectual power, through words and things,
Went sounding on a dim and perilous way!1

Ibid.

Society became my glittering bride,
And airy hopes my children.

And the most difficult of tasks to keep

Heights which the soul is competent to gain.

There is a luxury in self-dispraise;
And inward self-disparagement affords
To meditative spleen a grateful feast.

Recognizes ever and anon

Ibid.

Book iv.

Ibid.

A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract
Of inland ground, applying to his ear
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell,
To which, in silence hushed, his very soul
Listened intensely; and his countenance soon
Brightened with joy, for from within were heard
Murmurings, whereby the monitor expressed
Mysterious union with his native sea.

So build we up the being that we are.

Ibid.

Ibid.

LANDOR: Gebir, book v.

One in whom persuasion and belief Had ripened into faith, and faith become A passionate intuition.

The Excursion. Book iv.

Spires whose "silent finger points to heaven." 1

Ah, what a warning for a thoughtless man,
Could field or grove, could any spot of earth,
Show to his eye an image of the pangs
Which it hath witnessed, - render back an echo
Of the sad steps by which it hath been trod!

And when the stream

Which overflowed the soul was passed away,
A consciousness remained that it had left
Deposited upon the silent shore

Of memory images and precious thoughts
That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed.

Wisdom married to immortal verse.2

A man he seems of cheerful yesterdays
And confident to-morrows.

The primal duties shine aloft, like stars;
The charities that soothe and heal and bless
Are scattered at the feet of man like flowers.

By happy chance we saw

A twofold image: on a grassy bank
A snow-white ram, and in the crystal flood
Another and the same!3

The gods approve

The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul.

Book vi.

Ibid.

Book vii.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Book ix.

Ibid.

Laodomia.

1 An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries with spire steeples, which, as they cannot be referred to any other object, point as with silent finger to the sky and stars. — -COLERIDGE: The Friend No. 14.

2 See Milton, page 249.

8 Another and the same. - DARWIN: The Botanic Garden.