I see a lily on thy brow, With anguish moist and fever dew; And on thy cheek a fading rose Fast withereth too.
It keeps eternal whisperings around desolate shores.
I have good reason to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.
Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering?
Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel.
The Public – a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.
It appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy citadel.
Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.
There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify – so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.
Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings.
You speak of Lord Byron and me; there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.
I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
I will give you a definition of a proud man: he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise.
I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.
Real are the dreams of gods, and soothly pass their pleasures in a long immortal dream.
The excellence of every Art is its intensity.
Alas! when passion is both meek and wild!
You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.
To feel forever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever-or else swoon in death.