Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.
For this is the most civil sort of lie That can be given to a man’s face. I now Say what I think.
One word is too often profaned For me to profane it, One feeling too falsely disdained For thee to disdain it.
It is found easier, by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen.
The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation.
By all that is sacred in our hope for the human race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth to give a fair trial to the vegetable system!
There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet, and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried.
It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.
I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne, and yet must bear.
The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want: worse need for them. The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.
A lovely lady, garmented in light From her own beauty.
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, what doubts should we have concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses?
All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. ‘The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’ But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being.
Hence in solitude, or that deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart.
Venice, it’s temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.
No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I endure.
If we reason we would be understood; if we imagine we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another’s; if we feel we would that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own; that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood. This is love.
The desire of the moth for the star.
I had rather not have any more of my hopes and illusions mocked by sad realities.