Hither and thither spins The wind-borne mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.
The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I.
Where great whales come sailing by, Sail and sail, with unshut eye, Round the world for ever and aye.
O strong soul, by what shore Tarriest thou now? For that force, Surely, has not been left vain!
Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.
Coldly, sadly descends The autumn evening. The Field Strewn with its dank yellow drifts Of wither’d leaves, and the elms, Fade into dimness apace, Silent; hardly a shout From a few boys late at their play!
The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness ; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience .
Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one’s mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry.
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, A foiled circuitous wanderertill at last The longed-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.
Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to life.
Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true.
The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty. Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.
Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.
What really dissatisfies in American civilisation is the want of the interesting, a want due chiefly to the want of those two great elements of the interesting, which are elevation and beauty.
Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, Where the winds are all asleep; Where the spent lights quiver and gleam; Where the salt weed sways in the stream.
The eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness.
But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.
Whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all.
Religion is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling.