Happy Birthday, William Wordsworth.

William, were you still alive, you'd be 234. An impressive age, by any estimation. And college students would travel from the distant corners of the earth to your doorstep, just for the opportunity to beat the crap out of you.

*****

On a more reflective note, here are some lines to savor, in honor of the man who helped launch Romanticism in British poetry.


---Excerpt from "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey..."

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:--feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,--
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.



(In case you're curious, I don't remember what this means either. Coleridge was cooler anyway. "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan\ A stately pleasure dome decree...")