1770-1850.
Quilt and Sorrow.
St. 41.
And homeless near a thousand homes I stood,
And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.
My Heart Leaps up.
The Child is father of the Man.
Lucy Gray.
St. 2.
The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door.
We are Seven.
A simple Child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
The Pet Lamb.
Drink, pretty creature, drink.
The Brothers.
Until a man might travel twelve stout miles,
Or reap an acre of his neighbor's corn.
Stanzas written in Thomson.
A noticeable man, with large gray eyes.
Lucy.
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and oh!
The difference to me!
The Solitary Reaper.
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again.
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
Rob Hoy's Grave.
St. 9.
Because the good old rule
Sufficeth them, the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can.
Yarrow Unvisited.
The swan on still St. Mary's Lake
Float double, swan and shadow!
Sonnets to National Independence and Liberty.
Part i. vi
Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great is passed away.
Part i. xiv.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart.
Part i. xvi.
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.
Nutting.
One of those heavenly days that cannot die.
She was a Phantom of Delight.
A Creature not too bright or good
For human nature's daily food,
For transient sorrows, simple wiles;
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.
A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command.
I Wandered Lonely.
That inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.
Ruth.
A Youth to whom was given
So much of earth, so much of heaven.
Resolution and Independence.
Part i. St. 7
I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride;
Of him who walked in glory and in joy,
Following his plough, along the mountainside.
Hart-Leap Well.
Part ii
"A jolly place," said he, "in times of old!
But something ails it now: the spot is cursed." Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.
Tintern Abbey.
Sensations sweet
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.
That best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
That blessed mood,
In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened.
The fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart.
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colors and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm
By thoughts supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. But hearing often-times
The still, sad music of humanity.
To a Skylark.
Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home.
Peter Bell.
Prologue. St. 1.
There's something in a flying horse,
There's something in a huge balloon.
Prologue. St. 27.
The common growth of Mother Earth
Suffices me—her tears, her mirths
Her humblest mirth and tears.
Part i. St. 12.
A primrose by a river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.
Part i. St. 15.
The soft blue sky did never melt
Into his heart; he never felt
The witchery of the soft blue sky!
Part i. St. 26.
As if the man had fixed his face,
In many a solitary place,
Against the wind and open sky!
Miscellaneous Sonnets.
Part i. xxx.
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration.
Part i. xxxiii.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Part i. xxxv.
'Tis hers to pluck the amaranthine flower
Of Faith, and round the Sufferer's temples bind
Wreaths that endure affliction's heaviest shower,
And do not shrink from sorrow's keenest wind.
Part ii. xxxvi.
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
Ecclesiastical Sonnets.
Part iii. v. Walton's Book of Lives.
The feather, whence the pen
Was shaped that traced the lives of these good men,
Dropped from an Angel's wing.
Meek Walton's heavenly memory.
The Tables Turned.
Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books,
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
A Poet's Epitaph.
St. 5.
One that would peep and botanize
Upon his mother's grave.
Personal Talk.
St. 3.
The gentle Lady married to the Moor,
And heavenly Una with her milk-white Lamb.
The Small Celandine.
(From Poems referring to the Period of Old Age.)
To be a Prodigal's Favorite—then, worse truth,
A Miser's Pensioner—behold our lot!
Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm.
St. 4.
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet's dream.
Intimations of Immorality.
St 5.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
St. xi.
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
THE EXCURSION.
Book i.
The vision and the faculty divine.
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise.
The good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket.
Book ii.
With battlements, that on their restless fronts
Bore stars.
Book iii.
Wrongs unredressed, or insults unavenged.
Monastic brotherhood, upon rock Aerial.
Book iv.
I have seen
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 its native sea.
One in whom persuasion and belief
Had ripened into faith, and faith become
A passionate intuition.
Book vi.
Spires whose silent fingers point to heaven.
Book vii.
Wisdom married to immortal verse.
Book ix.
The primal duties shine aloft, like stars,
The charities, that soothe, and heal, and bless,
Are scattered at the feet of Man, like flowers.