I am sailing with thee through the dizzy sky! How beautiful thou art!
Through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams The summer time away.
And how they kist each other’s tremulous eyes.
Closer of lovely eyes to lovely dreams, Lover of loneliness, and wandering, Of upcast eye, and tender pondering! Thee must I praise above all other glories That smile us on to tell delightful stories.
When it is moving on luxurious wings, The soul is lost in pleasant smotherings.
I have had a thousand kisses, for which with my whole soul I thank love – but if you should deny me the thousand and first – ’t would put me to the proof how great a misery I could live through.
If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me – nothing to make my friends proud of my memory – but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.
I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence.
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity...
I will imagine you Venus tonight and pray, pray, pray to your star like a Heathen.
I will clamber through the clouds and exist.
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.