The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
In this sonnet Wordsworth laments that people have “given our hearts away” to commerce and no longer see anything of nature as their own. He says he would rather be “a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn” than live that way.
I wandered lonely as a Cloud / That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd / A host of dancing Daffodills;
My heart leaps up when I behold / A Rainbow in the sky:
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, / The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.