Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry – and we have Shakespeare.
But thou, my son, study to make prevail One colour in thy life, the hue of truth.
The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.
Grey time-worn marbles Hold the pure Muses. In their cool gallery, By yellow Tiber, They still look fair.
Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man taken by himself.
All the live murmur of a summer’s day.
Calm soul of all things! make it mine To feel, amid the city’s jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and cannot mar! The will to neither strive nor cry, The power to feel what others give! Calm, calm me more! nor let me die Before I have begun to live.
All this I bear, for, what I seek, I know: Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm: Endless extinction of unhappy hates.
The love of science, and the energy and honesty in the pursuit of science, in the best of the Aryan races do seem to correspond in a remarkable way to the love of conduct, and the energy and honesty in the pursuit of conduct, in the best of the Semitic.
What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form, The lustre of the eye? Is it for Beauty to forego her wreath? Yes; but not this alone.
One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common – discontent.
If Paris that brief flight allow, My humble tomb explore! It bears: Eternity, be thou My refuge! and no more.
No, no! The energy of life may be Kept on after the grave, but not begun; And he who flagg’d not in the earthly strife, From strength to strength advancing – only he His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.
Like driftwood spares which meet and pass Upon the boundless ocean-plain, So on the sea of life, alas! Man nears man, meets, and leaves again.
Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye Forever doth accompany mankind, Hath look’d on no religion scornfully That men did ever find.
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.
It is so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done.
Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.
We should conceive of poetry worthily, and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies, than those which in general men have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.
Culture is the most resolute enemy of anarchy, because of the great hopes and designs for the State which culture teaches us to nourish.
The fewer there are who follow the way to perfection, the harder that way is to find.