My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man.

Spade! Thou art a tool of honor in my hands. I press thee, through a yielding soil, with pride.

The child is father of the man: And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.

The clouds that gather round the setting sun do take a sober colouring from an eye that hath kept watch o'er man's mortality; another race hath been, and other palms are won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live, thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, to me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Far from the world I walk, and from all care.

Turning, for them who pass, the common dust Of servile opportunity to gold.