Quotes
Quotes about Wit
The holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless with adoration.
Yet sometimes, when the secret cup
Of still and serious thought went round,
It seemed as if he drank it up,
He felt with spirit so profound.
My eyes are dim with childish tears,
My heart is idly stirred,
For the same sound is in my ears
Which in those days I heard.
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.
A noticeable man, with large gray eyes.
Oft on the dappled turf at ease
I sit, and play with similes,
Loose type of things through all degrees.
Sweet Mercy! to the gates of heaven
This minstrel lead, his sins forgiven;
The rueful conflict, the heart riven
With vain endeavour,
And memory of Earth's bitter leaven
Effaced forever.
Where the statue stood
Of Newton, with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind forever
Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.
Who, doomed to go in company with Pain
And Fear and Bloodshed,--miserable train!--
Turns his necessity to glorious gain.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours.
Maidens withering on the stalk.
Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,
Are a substantial world, both pure and good.
Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,
Our pastime and our happiness will grow.
The gentle Lady married to the Moor,
And heavenly Una with her milk-white lamb.
Blessings be with them, and eternal praise,
Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares!--
The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
Earth helped him with the cry of blood.
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.
"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?
With battlements that on their restless fronts
Bore stars.
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.
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!
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.
That kill the bloom before its time,
And blanch, without the owner's crime,
The most resplendent hair.
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!
But who would force the soul tilts with a straw
Against a champion cased in adamant.
