How wonderful is Death!
Death and his brother Sleep.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton.
Heaven's ebon vault
Studded with stars unutterably bright,
Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls,
Seems like a canopy which love has spread
To curtain her sleeping world.
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.
I wish no living thing to suffer pain.
Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
And many an ante-natal tomb When butterflies dream of the life to come.
I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder.
Far clouds of feathery gold, Shaded with deepest purple, gleam Like islands on a dark blue sea.
The desire of the moth for the star, Of the night for the morrow, The devotion to something afar From the sphere of our sorrow.
No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.
. . . then black despair The shadow of a starless night, was thrown Over the world in which I moved alone.
Around, around in ceaseless circles wheeling With clangs of wings and scream, the Eagle sailed Incessantly.
Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine, Yet let's be merry; we'll have tea and toast; Custards for supper, and an endless host Of syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies, And other such ladylike luxuries.
Lost Echo sits amid the voiceless mountains, And feeds her grief.
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity.
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame Over his living head like Heaven is bent, An early but enduring monument, Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song In sorrow.
Familiar acts are beautiful through love.
Is it not odd that the only generous person I ever knew, who had money to be generous with, should be a stockbroker.
Like a glowworm golden, in a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden its aerial blue Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view.
Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, The signet of its all-enslaving power Upon a shining ore, and called it gold; Before whose image bow the vulgar great, The vainly rich, the miserable proud, The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings, And with blind feelings reverence the power That grinds them to the dust of misery. But in the temple of their hireling hearts Gold is a living god, and rules in scorn All earthly things but virtue.
You must come home with me and be my guest; You will give joy to me, and I will do All that is in my power to honour you.
History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.