Oh, be wiser thou!
Instructed that true knowledge leads to love.
And homeless near a thousand homes I stood,
And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.
Action is transitory,--a step, a blow;
The motion of a muscle, this way or that.
Three sleepless nights I passed in sounding on,
Through words and things, a dim and perilous way.
A simple child
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
O Reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle Reader! you would find
A tale in everything.
I 've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Hath oftener left me mourning.
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.
And 't is my faith, that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.
Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.
Up! up! my friend, and quit your books,
Or surely you 'll grow double!
Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks!
Why all this toil and trouble?
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
The bane of all that dread the Devil.
Sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart.
That best portion of a good man's life,--
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
That blessed mood,
In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened.
The fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart.
The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite,--a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm
By thoughts supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.
But hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity.
A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,--
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her.
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life.
Men who can hear the Decalogue, and feel
To self-reproach.
As in the eye of Nature he has lived,
So in the eye of Nature let him die!