Vain is the glory of the sky,

The beauty vain of field and grove, Unless, while with admiring eye

We gaze, we also learn to love.

-Glad Sight.

Thou wilt salute old memories as they throng
Into thy heart; and fancies, running wild

Through fresh green fields, and budding groves among,
Will make thee happy, happy as a child:

Of sunshine wilt thou think, and flowers and song,
And breathe as in a world where nothing can go wrong.
-The Cuckoo Clock.

For who what is shall measure by what seems

To be, or not to be,

Or tax high Heaven with prodigality?

-The Unremitting Voice.

Action is transitory,—a step, a blow—
The action of a muscle, this way or that.

The child is father of the man.

-The Borderers.

-My Heart Leaps Up.

Sweet childish days, that were as long

As twenty days are now.

A Briton, even in love, should be

A subject, not a slave!

-To a Butterfly.

--Ere with Cold Beads of Midnight Dew.

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,

Whose veil is unremoved

Till heart with heart in concord beats,

And the lover is beloved.

-To

Minds that have nothing to confer

Find little to perceive.

-Yes, Thou Art Fair.

Why art thou silent! Is thy love a plant
Of such weak fibre that the treacherous air
Of absence withers what was once so fair?
Is there no debt to pay, no boon to grant?

-Why Art Thou Silent.

Yet have my thoughts for thee been vigilant
Bound to thy service with unceasing care,
The mind's least generous wish a mendicant
For naught but what thy happiness could spare.
-Why Art Thou Silent.

Something between a hindrance and a help.

But he is oft the wisest man

-Michael.

Who is not wise at all.

-The Oak and the Broom.

A youth to whom was given

So much of earth, so much of heaven.

That least of all can aught—that ever owned
The heaven-regarding eye and front sublime
Which man is born to-sink, howe'er depressed,
So low as to be scorned without a sin.

-Old Cumberland Beggar.

Long have I loved what I behold,

The night that calms, the day that cheers;
The common-growth of Mother-earth

Suffices me-her tears, her mirth,

Her humblest mirth and tears.

-Peter Bell.

Such delight I found

To note in shrub and tree, in stone and flower
That intermixture of delicious hues,
Along so vast a surface, all at once,
In one impression, by connecting force

Of their own beauty, imaged in the heart.

-To Johanna.

Gone from this world of earth, air, sea, and sky,
From all its spirit, moving imagery,

Intensely studied with a painter's eye,

A poet's heart.

The primal flight

-Elegiac Musings.

Of the poetic ecstasy

Into the land of mystery.

-Oft Have 1 Caught.

O Nightingale! Who ever heard thy song
Might here be moved, till Fancy grows so strong
That listening sense is pardonably cheated

Where wood or stream by thee was never greeted.

-By the Side of Rydal Mere.

What are helps of time and place,

When Wisdom stands in need of Nature's grace;
Why do good thoughts, invoked or not, descend
Like Angels from their bowers, our virtues to befriend.

-Soft as a Cloud.

Plain living and high thinking are no more,

-Sonnet. London, 1802.

Tears to human suffering are due:

And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown
Are mourned by man.

-Laodamia.

Soft is the music that would charm forever,
The flower of sweetest smell is shy and lowly.

-Sonnet.

How does the meadow-flower in its bloom unfold?
Because the lovely little flower is free
Down to its root, and in that freedom, bold.

-Sonnet.

The best of what we do and are,

Just God, forgive!

-Thoughts on the Banks of Nith.

Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade
Of that which once was great is passed away.
-The Venetian Republic.

The feather whence the pen

Was shaped that traced the lives of these good men, Dropped from an angel's wing.

-Ecclesiastical Sonnets.

I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds

With coldness still returning;

Alas! the gratitude of men

Hath oftener left me mourning.

-Simon Lee.

Yet sometimes when the secret cup

Of still and serious thought went round,

It seemed as if he drank it up,

He felt with spirit so profound.

Whence can comfort spring

-Matthew.

When prayer is of no avail?

-Force of Prayer.

But hushed be every thought that springs

From out the bitterness of things.

-To Sir George Beaumont.

Those recollected hours that have the charm
Of visionary things, those lovely forms

And sweet sensations that throw back our life,
And almost make remotest infancy

A visible scene, on which the sun is shining.

-Book I.

Tell,-how Wallace fought for Scotland; left the name
Of Wallace to be found, like a wild flower,
All over his dear Country; left the deeds
Of Wallace like a family of ghosts,

To people the steep rocks and river banks,
Her natural sanctuaries, with a local soul
Of independence and stern liberty.

The fairest of all rivers, loved

-Book I.

Nursed in his mother's arms, who sinks to sleep
Rocked on his mother's breast; who with his soul
Drinks in the feelings of his mother's eye!
For him, in one dear presence, there exists
A virtue which irradiates and exalts
Objects through widest intercourse of sense,
No outcast he, bewildered and depressed:
Along his infant veins are interfused
The gravitation and the filial bond

Of nature that connect him with the world..
Is there a flower, to which he points with hand
Too weak to gather it, already love

Drawn from love's purest earthly fount for him

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