Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: Chapters I-IV, XIV-XXII. Wordsworth, Prefaces and Essays on Poetry, 1800-1815

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1920 - 327 pages

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Page xxxvi - O Lady! we receive but what we give And in our life alone does Nature live: Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element!
Page 242 - The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite ; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any interest Unborrowed from the eye.
Page 63 - ... with him: Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odour and in hue, Could make me any summer's story tell, Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew : Nor did I wonder at the lily's white, Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose ; They were but sweet, but figures of delight, Drawn after you ; you pattern of all those. Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away, As with your shadow I with these did play : XCIX.
Page xxxv - A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear...
Page xxxvi - All this long eve, so balmy and serene, Have I been gazing on the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow green; And still I gaze — and with how blank an eye! And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars, That give away their motion to the stars: Those stars, that glide behind them or between, Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen; Yon crescent Moon, as fixed as if it grew In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue; 1 see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how beautiful...
Page 74 - ... because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and consequently may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings, and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.
Page 53 - ... to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.
Page 177 - Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.
Page 63 - From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April, dress'd in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him. Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odour and in hue, Could make me any summer's story tell, Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew: Nor did...
Page xxxvii - But now afflictions bow me down to earth : Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth, But oh ! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, My shaping spirit of Imagination.

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