Familiar Quotations, - [best romance ebooks .txt] 📗
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Ode. Intimations of Immortality. Stanza 10.
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
Ode. Intimations of Immortality. Stanza 10.
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.
Ode. Intimations of Immortality. Stanza 11.
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
Ode. Intimations of Immortality. Stanza 11.
Two voices are there: one is of the sea,
One of the mountains,—each a mighty voice.
Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland.
Earth helped him with the cry of blood.[478:1]
Song at the Feast of Broughton Castle.
The silence that is in the starry sky.
Song at the Feast of Broughton Castle.
[479]
The monumental pomp of age
Was with this goodly personage;
A stature undepressed in size,
Unbent, which rather seemed to rise
In open victory o'er the weight
Of seventy years, to loftier height.
The White Doe of Rylstone. Canto iii.
"What is good for a bootless bene?"
With these dark words begins my tale;
And their meaning is, Whence can comfort spring
When prayer is of no avail?
Force of Prayer.
A few strong instincts, and a few plain rules.
Alas! what boots the long laborious Quest?
Of blessed consolations in distress.
Preface to the Excursion. (Edition, 1814.)
The vision and the faculty divine;
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.
The Excursion. Book i.
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise.
The Excursion. Book i.
That mighty orb of song,
The divine Milton.
The Excursion. Book i.
The good die first,[479:1]
And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket.
The Excursion. Book i.
This dull product of a scoffer's pen.
The Excursion. Book ii.
With battlements that on their restless fronts
Bore stars.
The Excursion. Book ii.
Wisdom is ofttimes nearer when we stoop
Than when we soar.
The Excursion. Book iii.
[480]
Wrongs unredressed, or insults unavenged.
The Excursion. Book iii.
Monastic brotherhood, upon rock
Aerial.
The Excursion. Book iii.
The intellectual power, through words and things,
Went sounding on a dim and perilous way![480:1]
The Excursion. Book iii.
Society became my glittering bride,
And airy hopes my children.
The Excursion. Book iii.
And the most difficult of tasks to keep
Heights which the soul is competent to gain.
The Excursion. Book iv.
There is a luxury in self-dispraise;
And inward self-disparagement affords
To meditative spleen a grateful feast.
The Excursion. Book iv.
Recognizes ever and anon
The breeze of Nature stirring in his soul.
The Excursion. Book iv.
Pan himself,
The simple shepherd's awe-inspiring god!
The Excursion. Book iv.
I have seen
A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract
Of inland ground, applying to his ear
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell,
To which, in silence hushed, his very soul
Listened intensely; and his countenance soon
Brightened with joy, for from within were heard
Murmurings, whereby the monitor expressed
Mysterious union with his native sea.[480:2]
The Excursion. Book iv.
So build we up the being that we are.
The Excursion. Book iv.
[481]
One in whom persuasion and belief
Had ripened into faith, and faith become
A passionate intuition.
The Excursion. Book iv.
Spires whose "silent finger points to heaven."[481:1]
The Excursion. Book vi.
Ah, what a warning for a thoughtless man,
Could field or grove, could any spot of earth,
Show to his eye an image of the pangs
Which it hath witnessed,—render back an echo
Of the sad steps by which it hath been trod!
The Excursion. Book vi.
And when the stream
Which overflowed the soul was passed away,
A consciousness remained that it had left
Deposited upon the silent shore
Of memory images and precious thoughts
That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed.
The Excursion. Book vii.
Wisdom married to immortal verse.[481:2]
The Excursion. Book vii.
A man he seems of cheerful yesterdays
And confident to-morrows.
The Excursion. Book vii.
The primal duties shine aloft, like stars;
The charities that soothe and heal and bless
Are scattered at the feet of man like flowers.
The Excursion. Book ix.
By happy chance we saw
A twofold image: on a grassy bank
A snow-white ram, and in the crystal flood
Another and the same![481:3]
The Excursion. Book ix.
The gods approve
The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul.
Laodamia.
[482]
Mightier far
Than strength of nerve or sinew, or the sway
Of magic potent over sun and star,
Is Love, though oft to agony distrest,
And though his favorite seat be feeble woman's breast.
Laodamia.
Elysian beauty, melancholy grace,
Brought from a pensive though a happy place.
Laodamia.
He spake of love, such love as spirits feel
In worlds whose course is equable and pure;
No fears to beat away, no strife to heal,—
The past unsighed for, and the future sure.
Laodamia.
Of all that is most beauteous, imaged there
In happier beauty; more pellucid streams,
An ampler ether, a diviner air,
And fields invested with purpureal gleams.
Laodamia.
Yet tears to human suffering are due;
And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown
Are mourned by man, and not by man alone.
Laodamia.
But shapes that come not at an earthly call
Will not depart when mortal voices bid.
Dion.
But thou that didst appear so fair
To fond imagination,
Dost rival in the light of day
Her delicate creation.
Yarrow Visited.
'T is hers to pluck the amaranthine flower
Of faith, and round the sufferer's temples bind
Wreaths that endure affliction's heaviest shower,
And do not shrink from sorrow's keenest wind.
Weak is the Will of Man.
We bow our heads before Thee, and we laud
And magnify thy name Almighty God!
But man is thy most awful instrument
In working out a pure intent.
Ode. Imagination before Content.
[483]
Sad fancies do we then affect,
In luxury of disrespect
To our own prodigal excess
Of too familiar happiness.
Ode to Lycoris.
That kill the bloom before its time,
And blanch, without the owner's crime,
The most resplendent hair.
Lament of Mary Queen of Scots.
The sightless Milton, with his hair
Around his placid temples curled;
And Shakespeare at his side,—a freight,
If clay could think and mind were weight,
For him who bore the world!
The Italian Itinerant.
Meek Nature's evening comment on the shows
That for oblivion take their daily birth
From all the fuming vanities of earth.
Sky-Prospect from the Plain of France.
Turning, for them who pass, the common dust
Of servile opportunity to gold.
Desultory Stanza.
Babylon,
Learned and wise, hath perished utterly,
Nor leaves her speech one word to aid the sigh
That would lament her.
Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Part i. xxv. Missions and Travels.
As thou these ashes, little brook, wilt bear
Into the Avon, Avon to the tide
Of Severn, Severn to the narrow seas,
Into main ocean they, this deed accursed
An emblem yields to friends and enemies
How the bold teacher's doctrine, sanctified
By truth, shall spread, throughout the world dispersed.[483:1]
Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Part ii. xvii. To Wickliffe.
[484]
The feather, whence the pen
Was shaped that traced the lives of these good men,
Dropped from an angel's wing.[484:1]
Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Part iii. v. Walton's Book of Lives.
Meek Walton's heavenly memory.
Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Part iii. v. Walton's Book of Lives.
But who would force the soul tilts with a straw
Against a champion cased in adamant.
Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Part iii. vii. Persecution of the Scottish Covenanters.
Where music dwells
Lingering and wandering on as loth to die,
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality.
Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Part iii. xliii. Inside of King's Chapel, Cambridge.
Or shipwrecked, kindles on the coast
False fires, that others may be lost.
To the Lady Fleming.
But hushed be every thought that springs
From out the bitterness of things.
Elegiac Stanzas. Addressed to Sir G. H. B.
[485]
To the solid ground
Of Nature trusts the mind that builds for aye.
A Volant Tribe of Bards on Earth.
Soft is the music that would charm forever;
The flower of sweetest smell is shy and lowly.
Not Love, not War.
True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.
To ——. Let other Bards of Angels sing.
Type of the wise who soar but never roam,
True to the kindred points of heaven and home.
To a Skylark.
A Briton even in love should be
A subject, not a slave!
Ere with Cold Beads of Midnight Dew.
Scorn not the sonnet. Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart.[485:1]
Scorn not the Sonnet.
And when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains,—alas! too few.
Scorn not the Sonnet.
But he is risen, a later star of dawn.
A Morning Exercise.
Bright gem instinct with music, vocal spark.
A Morning Exercise.
When his veering gait
And every motion of his starry train
Seem governed by a strain
Of music, audible to him alone.
The Triad.
[486]
Alas! how little can a moment show
Of an eye where feeling plays
In ten thousand dewy rays:
A face o'er which a thousand shadows go!
The Triad.
Stern Winter loves a dirge-like sound.
On the Power of Sound. xii.
The bosom-weight, your stubborn gift,
That no philosophy can lift.
Presentiments.
Nature's old felicities.
The Trosachs.
Myriads of daisies have shone forth in flower
Near the lark's nest, and in their natural hour
Have passed away; less happy than the one
That by the unwilling ploughshare died to prove
The tender charm of poetry and love.
Poems composed during a Tour in the Summer of 1833. xxxvii.
Small service is true service while it lasts.
Of humblest friends, bright creature! scorn not one:
The daisy, by the shadow that it casts,
Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun.
To a Child. Written in her Album.
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source,
The rapt one, of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth:
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his lonely hearth.
Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg.
How fast has brother followed brother,
From sunshine to the sunless land!
Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg.
Those old credulities, to Nature dear,
Shall they no longer bloom upon the stock
Of history?
Memorials of a Tour in Italy. iv.
[487]
How does the meadow-flower its bloom unfold?
Because the lovely little flower is free
Down to its root, and in that freedom bold.
A Poet! He hath put his Heart to School.
Minds that have nothing to confer
Find little to perceive.
Yes, Thou art Fair.
[465:1] Coleridge said to Wordsworth ("Memoirs" by his nephew, vol. ii. p. 74), "Since Milton, I know of no poet with so many felicities and unforgettable lines and stanzas as you."
[465:2]
The intellectual power, through words and things,
Went sounding on a dim and perilous way!
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