Within King's College Chapel, Cambridge
by William Wordsworth

English Romantic poet and poet-laureate, whose Lyrical Ballads (1798), first published anonymously with contributions by his friend Coleridge, marked an important turning point in the history of English literature. Some of his many well-known poems include 'The Brothers', 'Michael' and the "Lucy" poems: 'She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways', 'Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known', 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal' and 'Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower'. His other great work, the philosophical-autobiographical poem The Prelude was published posthumously in 1850. He also published two poems dealing with the sublime and the picturesque; An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches (both in 1793), and his one and only play The Borders (1842). Wordsworth's name, perhaps even more so than that of his friend Coleridge, remains to this day almost synonymous, in England, with Romanticism itself.

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Within King's College Chapel, Cambridge
by William Wordsworth

Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense,
With ill-matched aims the architect who planned
(Albeit labouring for a scanty band
Of white-robed scholars only) this immense

And glorious work of fine intelligence!
- Give all thou canst; high heaven rejects the lore
Of nicely-calculated less or more: -
So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense

These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells

Lingering -and wandering on as loath to die;
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality.

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Within King's College Chapel, Cambridge by William Wordsworth