The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet’s dream.
‘Elegiac Stanzas’ (on a picture of Peele Castle in a storm, 1807)
Not in the lucid intervals of life
That come but as a curse to party strife...
Is Nature felt, or can be.
‘Evening Voluntaries’ (1835) 4
By grace divine,
Not otherwise, O Nature, we are thine.
‘Evening Voluntaries’ (1835) 4
On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life,
Musing in solitude.
‘The Excursion’ (1814) preface, l. 1
The Mind of Man—
My haunt, and the main region of my song.
‘The Excursion’ (1814) preface, l. 40
Oh! many are the Poets that are sown
By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine;
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.
‘The Excursion’ (1814) bk. 1, l. 77
What soul was his, when from the naked top
Of some bold headland, he beheld the sun
Rise up, and bathe the world in light!
‘The Excursion’ (1814) bk. 1, l. 198
The good die first,
And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket.
‘The Excursion’ (1814) bk. 1, l. 500
This dull product of a scoffer’s pen.
‘The Excursion’ (1814) bk. 2, l. 484 (referring to Voltaire’s Candide)
The intellectual power, through words and things,
Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way!
‘The Excursion’ (1814) bk. 3, l. 700
Society became my glittering bride,
And airy hopes my children.
‘The Excursion’ (1814) bk. 3, l. 735
’Tis a thing impossible, to frame
Conceptions equal to the soul’s desires;