Health is the greatest of blessings – with health and hope we should be content to live.
Many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death.
To stay youthful, stay useful.
Or thou might’st better listen to the wind, Whose language is to thee a barren noise, Though it blows legend-laden through the trees.
Works of genius are the first things in the world.
All writing is a form of prayer.
A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory.
O, sorrow! Why dost borrow Heart’s lightness from the merriment of May?
How beautiful, if sorrow had not made Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self.
Soft closer of our eyes! Low murmur of tender lullabies!
Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music: – do I wake or sleep?
But were there ever any Writhed not at passed joy?
Hear ye not the hum Of mighty workings?
In a drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy brook, Thy bubblings ne’er remember Apollo’s summer look; But with a sweet forgetting, They stay their crystal fretting, Never, never petting About the frozen time.
I do think better of womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats five feet high likes them or not.
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft; and gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
A long poem is a test of invention which I take to be the Polar star of poetry, as fancy is the sails, and imagination the rudder.
The opinion I have of the generality of women – who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar plum than my time, forms a barrier against matrimony which I rejoice in.
I have nothing to speak of but my self-and what can I say but what I feel.