"It (my book) is a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed between God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus, my Master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom. (Maycock, A L, Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding. SPCK, London, 1938)"

"My meaning (dear Mother) is in these sonnets, to declare my resolution to be, that my poor abilities in poetry, shall be all and ever consecrated to God's glory."

"Do well and right, and let the world sink."

"Wouldst thou both eat thy cake and have it?"

"Man is one world, and hath Another to attend him."

"Bibles laid open, millions of surprises."

"Like summer friends, Flies of estate and sunneshine."

"Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses, A box where sweets compacted lie."

"To write a verse or two is all the praise That I can raise."

"Knowledge is folly unless grace guide it."

"I travelled among unknown men, In lands beyond the sea; Nor, England! did I know till then What love I bore to thee."

"Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there."

"Scott could make men breathe the breath of battle; Byron could only make men smell the reek of carnage; but Wordsworth alone could put into his verse the whole soul of a nation armed or arming for self-devoted self-defence; could fill his meditation with the spirit of a whole people, that in the act of giving it a voice and an expression he might inform and renovate that spirit with the purity and sublimity of his own."

"A certain clumsiness always remains; but in his earlier period he had the power of arresting simple thought with the magic of poetical inspiration. The great stimulus came from the French revolution. The sympathy which he felt with the supposed restoration of an idyllic order disappeared when it took the form of social disintegration. The growth of pauperism and the factory system, and the decay of old simple society, intensified the impression; and some of his noblest poems are devoted to celebrating the virtues which he took to be endangered. Wordsworth's love of ‘nature’ is partly an expression of the same feeling. He loved the mountains because they were the barriers which protected the peasant. He loved them also because they echoed his own most characteristic moods. His ‘mystical’ or pantheistic view of nature meant the delight of the lonely musings when he had to ‘grasp a tree’ to convince himself of the reality of the world. The love of nature was therefore the other side of his ‘egotism.’ He hated the scientific view which substituted mere matter of fact for emotional stimulus. The truth and power of his sentiment make this the most original and most purely poetical element in his writings. He could as little rival Coleridge and Shelley in soaring above the commonplace world as Byron or Burns in uttering the passions. But in his own domain, the expression of the deep and solemn emotions of a quiet recluse among simple people and impressive scenery, he is equally unsurpassable."