A sensitive plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan like leaves to the light, and closed them beneath the kisses of night.
I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.
Love, from its awful throne of patient power In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep, And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs And folds over the world its healing wings.
But hope will make thee young, for Hope and Youth Are children of one mother, even Love.
In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.
My father Time is weak and gray With waiting for a better day; See how idiot-like he stands, Fumbling with his palsied hands!
The flood of time is rolling on; We stand upon its brink, whilst they are gone To glide in peace down death’s mysterious stream. Have ye done well?
Worse than despair, Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope.
Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
Through the sunset of hope, Like the shapes of a dream, What paradise islands of glory gleam!
To hope till hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.
Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whatever it touches.
A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.
And the rose like a nymph to the bath addrest, Which unveiled the depth of her glowing breast, Till, fold after fold, to the fainting air, The soul of her beauty and love lay bare.
The soul’s joy lies in doing.
Among true and real friends, all is common; and were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friend.
The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity, Until Death tramples it to fragments.
Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
It is among men of genius and science that atheism alone is found.
Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend, Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men, And heaven with slaves!