Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 27, 2025
a sonnet which contains, surely, two or three of the most magical lines that Wordsworth ever wrote. It is of course no purpose of these notes to give any fresh account of Wordsworth at Rydal, or any exhaustive record of the relations between the Wordsworths and Fox How, especially after the recent publication of Professor Harper's fresh, interesting, though debatable biography.
Radcliffes and Rousseaus, as well as its Wordsworths; but, on the whole, the feeling with which Robson drew mountains, and Prout architecture, with which Fielding draws moors, and Stanfield sea is altogether pure, true, and precious, as compared with that which suggested the landscape of the seventeenth century. Now observe, how simple the whole subject becomes.
His own health, however, had been steadily declining in these latter years, and the German tour with the Wordsworths must, I should imagine, have been the last expedition involving any considerable exercise of the physical powers which he was able to take. Within a year or so afterwards his condition seems to have grown sensibly worse.
Not chemists, astronomers, mechanicians have uttered the deepest thoughts about God, but prophets and poets: not Davys, but Coleridges; not Herschels, but Wordsworths. It is a common belief, indeed, that men addicted to the exact sciences are rather wanting than otherwise in power to appreciate the invisible, a belief pungently embodied by Wordsworth in the lines,
Every month whole troops of Herschels and Wordsworths, and Humes and Gibbons, were presented to her by the great critic; and with a devout faith in all he told her, she listened enraptured to the praises of those astonishing geniuses, till she had begun to enter into Mr Bristles's own feelings of contempt for every body except the favoured few.
The Wordsworths and Coleridges who patronized him were too self-opiniated and individualistic to be able to enter into either tradition. Wordsworth is neither a Christian or a Pagan. He is a moral philosopher. Elia is an artist, who understands the importance of ritual in life but of naturalness in ritual. How difficult, whether as a thinker or a man, is it to be natural in one's loves and hates!
Let famous men, whose reputation is firm-fixed our Wordsworths, Hallams, Campbells, Crolys, Wilsons, Bulwers, and the like decide in the case of at least all who desire such decision.
It has only within a comparatively recent period been ascertained that the visit of the Wordsworths to Germany was itself another result of Thomas Wedgwood's generous appreciation of literary merit. It appears, on the incontrovertible testimony of the Wedgwoods' accounts with their agents at Hamburg, that the expenses of all three travellers were defrayed by their friend at home.
Literature has smelt unpleasantly of the lamp since cloisters were no longer built, and men born for the cloister, the Rousseaus and the Wordsworths and the Nietzsches, wandered homelessly among the hills, while to-day we seek any feeble substitute for the cloister wherein to work at leisure in the free air of Nature, and hear the song of the birds and the plash of the rain at one's feet.
The Wordsworths remained for four wintry months at Goslar, in Saxony, while Coleridge went on to Ratzeburg, Göttingen, and other places, mastering German, and "delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths." Wordsworth made little way with the language, but worked diligently at his own verse.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking