There, that is our secret: go to sleep! You will wake, and remember, and understand.
Anybody is qualified, according to everybody, for giving opinions upon poetry. It is not so in chemistry and mathematics. Nor is it so, I believe, in whist and the polka. But then these are more serious things.
Whatever’s lost, it first was won.
O, brothers! let us leave the shame and sin Of taking vainly in a plaintive mood, The holy name of Grief – holy herein, That, by the grief of One, came all our good.
And there my little doves did sit With feathers softly brown And glittering eyes that showed their right To general Nature’s deep delight.
Life treads on life, and heart on heart; We press too close in church and mart To keep a dream or grave apart.
The soul’s Rialto hath its merchandise, I barter for curl upon that mart.
The essence of all beauty, I call love, The attribute, the evidence, and end, The consummation to the inward sense Of beauty apprehended from without, I still call love.
Wall must get the weather stain Before they grow the ivy.
Capacity for joy Admits temptation.
Free men freely work: Whoever fears God, fears to sit at ease.
The exchange of sympathy for gratitude is the most princely thing!
God only, who made us rich, can make us poor.
I have done most of my talking by post of late years – as people shut up in dungeons take up with scrawling mottoes on the walls.
The denial of contemporary genius is the rule rather than the exception. No one counts the eagles in the nest, till there is a rush of wings; and lo! they are flown.
Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.
Get leave to work In this world, – ’tis the best you get at all.
Too much beauty, I reckon, is nothing but too much sun.
Love me sweet With all thou art Feeling, thinking, seeing; Love me in the Lightest part, Love me in full Being.
What we call Life is a condition of the soul. And the soul must improve in happiness and wisdom, except by its own fault. These tears in our eyes, these faintings of the flesh, will not hinder such improvement.