Fills
The air around with beauty.
He who hath bent him o'er the dead
Ere the first day of death is fled,--
The first dark day of nothingness,
The last of danger and distress,
Before decay's effacing fingers
Have swept the lines where beauty lingers.
Who hath not proved how feebly words essay
To fix one spark of beauty's heavenly ray?
Who doth not feel, until his failing sight
Faints into dimness with its own delight,
His changing cheek, his sinking heart, confess
The might, the majesty of loveliness?
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.
A lovely lady, garmented in light
From her own beauty.
They grew in beauty side by side,
They filled one home with glee:
Their graves are severed far and wide
By mount and stream and sea.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
That heavenly music! what is it I hear?
The notes of the harpers ring sweet in mine ear.
And, see, soft unfolding those portals of gold,
The King all arrayed in his beauty behold!
Absence makes the heart grow fonder:
Isle of Beauty, fare thee well!
There's a double beauty whenever a swan
Swims on a lake with her double thereon.
The English Bible,--a book which if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore,
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.
The hand that rounded Peter's dome,
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew:
The conscious stone to beauty grew.
If eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being.
He thought it happier to be dead,
To die for Beauty, than live for bread.
Beauty seen is never lost.
The Beauty which old Greece or Rome
Sung, painted, wrought, lies close at home.
I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste.
The beautiful seems right
By force of Beauty, and the feeble wrong
Because of weakness.
Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.
I trust in Nature for the stable laws
Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant
And Autumn garner to the end of time.
I trust in God,--the right shall be the right
And other than the wrong, while he endures.
I trust in my own soul, that can perceive
The outward and the inward,--Nature's good
And God's.
I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
Toil on, poor heart, unceasingly;
And thou shalt find thy dream to be
A truth and noonday light to thee.
He could see naught but vanity in beauty
And naught but weakness in a fond caress
And pitied men whose views of Christian duty
Allowed indulgence in such foolishness.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me;
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.