Quotes
Quotes - Coleridge
Each matin bell, the Baron saith,
Knells us back to a world of death.
Her face, oh call it fair, not pale!
Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth,
And constancy live in realms above;
And life is thorny, and youth is vain,
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,--
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder:
A dreary sea now flows between.
Perhaps 't is pretty to force together
Thoughts so all unlike each other;
To mutter and mock a broken charm,
To dally with wrong that does no harm.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree,
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Ancestral voices prophesying war.
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade,
Death came with friendly care;
The opening bud to heaven conveyed,
And bade it blossom there.
Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare,
And shot my being through earth, sea, and air,
Possessing all things with intensest love,
O Liberty! my spirit felt thee there.
Forth from his dark and lonely hiding-place
(Portentous sight!) the owlet Atheism,
Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon,
Drops his blue-fring'd lids, and holds them close,
And hooting at the glorious sun in heaven
Cries out, "Where is it?"
And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin
Is pride that apes humility.
All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.
Blest hour! it was a luxury--to be!
A charm
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of life.
Hast thou a charm to stay the morning star
In his steep course?
Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines.
Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!
Ye living flowers that skirt the eternal frost.
Earth with her thousand voices praises God.
Tranquillity! thou better name
Than all the family of Fame.
The grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spence.
Joy is the sweet voice, joy the luminous cloud.
We in ourselves rejoice!
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colours a suffusion from that light.
A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive.
