Familiar Quotations, - [best romance ebooks .txt] 📗
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And thought to leave her far away behind;
But cheerly, cheerly,
She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind.
Endymion. Book iv.
So many, and so many, and such glee.
Endymion. Book iv.
Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is—Love, forgive us!—cinders, ashes, dust.
Lamia. Part ii.
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings.
Lamia. Part ii.
[575]
Music's golden tongue
Flatter'd to tears this aged man and poor.
The Eve of St. Agnes. Stanza 3.
The silver snarling trumpets 'gan to chide.
The Eve of St. Agnes. Stanza 4.
Asleep in lap of legends old.
The Eve of St. Agnes. Stanza 15.
Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose,
Flushing his brow.
The Eve of St. Agnes. Stanza 16.
A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing.
The Eve of St. Agnes. Stanza 18.
As though a rose should shut and be a bud again.
The Eve of St. Agnes. Stanza 27.
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon.
The Eve of St. Agnes. Stanza 30.
He play'd an ancient ditty long since mute,
In Provence call'd "La belle dame sans mercy."
The Eve of St. Agnes. Stanza 33.
That large utterance of the early gods!
Hyperion. Book i.
Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir.
Hyperion. Book i.
The days of peace and slumberous calm are fled.
Hyperion. Book ii.
Dance and Provençal song and sunburnt mirth!
Oh for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene!
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth.
Ode to a Nightingale.
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Ode to a Nightingale.
[576]
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time.
Ode on a Grecian Urn.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on,—
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
Ode on a Grecian Urn.
Thou, silent form, doth tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
Ode on a Grecian Urn.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Ode on a Grecian Urn.
In a drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity.
Stanzas.
Hear ye not the hum
Of mighty workings?
Addressed to Haydon. Sonnet x.
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne,
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise,
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
On first looking into Chapman's Homer.
E'en like the passage of an angel's tear
That falls through the clear ether silently.
To One who has been long in City pent.
[577]
The poetry of earth is never dead.
On the Grasshopper and Cricket.
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.[577:1]
[577:1] See Chapman, page 37.
Among the many things he has requested of me to-night, this is the principal,—that on his gravestone shall be this inscription.—Richard Monckton Milnes: Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Letter to Severn, vol. ii. p. 91.
THOMAS NOON TALFOURD. 1795-1854.So his life has flowed
From its mysterious urn a sacred stream,
In whose calm depth the beautiful and pure
Alone are mirrored; which, though shapes of ill
May hover round its surface, glides in light,
And takes no shadow from them.
Ion. Act i. Sc. 1.
'T is a little thing
To give a cup of water; yet its draught
Of cool refreshment, drained by fevered lips,
May give a shock of pleasure to the frame
More exquisite than when nectarean juice
Renews the life of joy in happiest hours.
Ion. Act i. Sc. 2.
THOMAS CARLYLE. 1795-1881.Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,—imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics,—"Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of—the air!"
Richter. Edinburgh Review, 1827.
Literary men are . . . a perpetual priesthood.
State of German Literature. Edinburgh Review, 1827.
[578]
Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
Goethe. Edinburgh Review, 1828.
We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
Goethe. Edinburgh Review, 1828.
How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?
Burns. Edinburgh Review, 1828.
A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.
Burns. Edinburgh Review, 1828.
His religion at best is an anxious wish,—like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.
Burns. Edinburgh Review, 1828.
We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."[578:1]
Voltaire. Foreign Review, 1829.
We must repeat the often repeated saying, that it is unworthy a religious man to view an irreligious one either with alarm or aversion, or with any other feeling than regret and hope and brotherly commiseration.
Voltaire. Foreign Review, 1829.
There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838.
[579]
Silence is deep as Eternity, speech is shallow as Time.
Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838.
To the very last, he [Napoleon] had a kind of idea; that, namely, of la carrière ouverte aux talents,—the tools to him that can handle them.[579:1]
Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838.
Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one!
Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838.
The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others.
Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838.
Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.
Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838.
It can be said of him, when he departed he took a Man's life with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of Time.
Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838.
The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."
Varnhagen Von Ense's Memoirs. London and Westminster Review, 1838.
Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books.[579:2]
Life of Frederick the Great. Book xvi. Chap. i.
As the Swiss inscription says: Sprechen ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden,—"Speech is silvern, Silence is golden;" or, as I might rather express it, Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.
Sartor Resartus. Book iii. Chap. iii.
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.[579:3]
Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Prophet.
[580]
In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Man of Letters.
The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.
Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Man of Letters.
One life,—a little gleam of time between two Eternities.
Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Man of Letters.
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Man of Letters.
[578:1] How comes it to pass, then, that we appear such cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the test of ridicule?—Shaftesbury: Characteristics. A Letter concerning Enthusiasm, sect. 2.
Truth, 't is supposed, may bear all lights; and one of those principal lights or natural mediums by which things are to be viewed in order to a thorough recognition is ridicule itself.—Shaftesbury: Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, sect. 1.
'T was the saying of an ancient sage (Gorgias Leontinus, apud Aristotle's "Rhetoric," lib. iii. c. 18), that humour was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious; and a jest which would not bear a serious examination was certainly false wit.—Ibid. sect. 5.
[579:1] Carlyle in his essay on Mirabeau, 1837, quotes this from a "New England book."
[579:2] Montesquieu: Aphorism.
[579:3] His only fault is that he has none.—Pliny the Younger: Book ix. Letter xxvi.
THOMAS C. HALIBURTON. 1796-1865.I want you to see Peel, Stanley, Graham, Sheil, Russell, Macaulay, Old Joe, and so on. They are all upper-crust here.[580:1]
Sam Slick In England.[580:2] Chap. xxiv.
Circumstances alter cases.
The Old Judge. Chap. xv.
[580:1] Those families, you know, are our upper-crust,—not upper ten thousand.—Cooper: The Ways of the Hour, chap. vi. (1850.)
At present there is no distinction among the upper ten thousand of the city.—N. P. Willis: Necessity for a Promenade Drive.
[580:2] "Sam Slick" first appeared in a weekly paper of Nova Scotia, 1835.
WILLIAM MOTHERWELL. 1797-1835.I 've wandered east, I 've wandered west,
Through many a weary way;
But never, never can forget
The love of life's young day.
Jeannie Morrison.
And we, with Nature's heart in tune,
Concerted harmonies.
Jeannie Morrison.
[581]
THOMAS HAYNES BAYLY. 1797-1839.I 'd be a butterfly born in a bower,
Where roses and lilies and violets meet.
I 'd be a Butterfly.
Oh no! we never mention her,—
Her name is never heard;
My lips are now forbid to speak
That once familiar word.
Oh no! we never mention her.
We met,—'t was in a crowd.
We met.
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