Pleasure must succeed to pleasure, else past pleasure turns to pain.
In heaven I yearn for knowledge, account all else inanity; On earth I confess an itch for the praise of fools – that’s vanity.
Why stay on the earth except to grow.
Sing, riding ’s a joy! For me I ride.
What? Was man made a wheel-work to wind up, And be discharged, and straight wound up anew? No! grown, his growth lasts; taught, he ne’er forgets: May learn a thousand things, not twice the same.
This could but have happened once,- And we missed it, lost it forever.
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound; What was good shall be good, with for evil so much good more; On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.
All service ranks the same with God,- With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first.
Lose who may-I still can say, Those who win heaven, blest are they!
In the morning of the world, When earth was nigher heaven than now.
Stand still, true poet that you are! I know you; let me try and draw you. Some night you’ll fail us: when afar You rise, remember one man saw you, Knew you, and named a star!
Most progress is most failure.
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was of us, Burns, Shelley, were with us. They watch from their graves!
Desire joy and thank God for it. Renounce it, if need be, for other’s sake. That’s joy beyond joy.
Faultless to a fault.
How good is life, the mere living!
My business is not to remake myself, but to make the absolute best of what God made.
O woman-country! wooed not wed, Loved all the more by earth’s male-lands, Laid to their hearts instead.
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.
Progress is The law of life: man is not Man as yet.