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| A courage to endure and to obey. | 1 |
| A day may sink or save a realm. | 2 |
| A lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright / But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight. | 3 |
| A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies. | 4 |
| A man is not as God, / But then most godlike being most a man. | 5 |
| A simple maiden in her flower, / Is worth a hundred coats of arms. | 6 |
| A smile abroad is oft a scowl at home. | 7 |
| A sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things. | 8 |
| A truth / Looks freshest in the fashion of the day. | 9 |
| An infant crying in the night, / An infant crying for the light; / And with no language but a cry. | 10 |
| As the husband is, the wife is: / Thou art mated with a clown, / And the grossness of his nature / Will have weight to drag thee down. | 11 |
| Battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer. | 12 |
| Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. | 13 |
| Better not be at all / Than not be noble. | 14 |
| But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand, / And the sound of a voice that is still. | 15 |
| By blood a king, in heart a clown. | 16 |
| Cast all your cares on God; that anchor holds. | 17 |
| Clear and bright it should be ever, / Flowing like a crystal river; / Bright as light, and clear as wind. On the Mind. | 18 |
| Courage, sir, / That makes man or woman look their goodliest. | 19 |
| Cursed be the social ties that warp us from the living truth. | 20 |
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| Death is sure / To those that stay and those that roam. | 21 |
| Dower’d with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, / The love of love. Of the poet. | 22 |
| Earn well the thrifty months, nor wed / Raw Haste, half-sister to Delay. | 23 |
| Either sex alone is half itself. | 24 |
| Every cloud that spreads above / And veileth love, itself is love. | 25 |
| Every worm beneath the moon / Draws different threads, and late and soon / Spins, toiling out his own cocoon. | 26 |
| Eyes not down-dropp’d nor over-bright, but fed with the clear-pointed flame of chastity. | 27 |
| Fame with men, / Being but ampler means to serve mankind, / Should have small rest or pleasure in herself, / But work as vassal to the larger love, / That dwarfs the petty love of one to one. | 28 |
| Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null. | 29 |
| For men at most differ as heaven and earth, / But women, worst and best, as heaven and hell. | 30 |
| For men may come and men may go, / But I go on for ever. | 31 |
| Forward, forward let us range, / Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. | 32 |
| From yon blue heaven above us bent, / The grand old gardener and his wife / Smile at the claims of long descent. | 33 |
| Full seldom doth a man repent, or use / Both grace and will to pick the vicious quitch / Of blood and custom wholly out of him, / And make all clean, and plant himself afresh. | 34 |
| Gentleness, when it weds with manhood, makes a man. | 35 |
| Gently comes the world to those / That are cast in gentle mould. | 36 |
| God gives us love. Something to love / He lends us; but when love is grown / To ripeness, that on which it throve / Falls off, and love is left alone. | 37 |
| Great deeds cannot die; / They with the sun and moon renew their light, / For ever blessing those that look on them. | 38 |
| Great is song used to great ends. | 39 |
| Have I not earn’d my cake in baking of it? | 40 |
| He had never kindly heart, / Nor ever cared to better his own kind, / Who first wrote satire with no pity in it. | 41 |
| He makes no friend who never made a foe. | 42 |
| He scarce is knight, yea, but half-man, nor meet / To fight for gentle damsel, he who lets / His heart be stirr’d with any foolish heat / At any gentle damsel’s waywardness. | 43 |
| He that wrongs his friend / Wrongs himself more, and ever bears about / A silent court of justice in his breast, / Himself the judge and jury, and himself / The prisoner at the bar, ever condemned. | 44 |
| He that, ever following her (Duty’s) commands, / On with toil of heart and knees and hands, / Thro’ the long gorge to the far light has won / His path upward, and prevail’d, / Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled, / Are close upon the shining tablelands / To which our God Himself is moon and sun. | 45 |
| He wrought all kind of service with a noble ease / That graced the lowliest act in doing it. | 46 |
| Her eyes are homes of silent prayer. | 47 |
| Hold thou the good; define it well. | 48 |
| How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use, / As though to breathe were life. | 49 |
| Howe’er it be, it seems to me / ’Tis only noble to be good. / Kind hearts are more than coronets, / And simple faith than Norman blood. | 50 |
| I can but trust that good shall fall / At last—far off—at last, to all. | 51 |
| I cannot love thee as I ought, / For love reflects the thing beloved; / My words are only words, and move / Upon the topmost froth of thought. | 52 |
| I chatter, chatter, as I flow / To join the brimming river, / For men may come and men may go, / But I go on for ever. | 53 |
| I do but sing because I must, / And pipe but as the linnets sing. | 54 |
| I hold it truth, with him who sings / To one clear harp in divers tones, / That men may rise on stepping-stones / Of their dead selves to higher things. | 55 |
| I never whisper’d a private affair / Within the hearing of cat or mouse, / No, not to myself in the closet alone, / But I heard it shouted at once from the top of the house; / Everything came to be known. | 56 |
| If all the world were falcons, what of that? / The wonder of the eagle were the less, / But he not less the eagle. | 57 |
| If I be dear to some one else, / Then I should be to myself more dear. | 58 |
| If there be / A devil in man, there is an angel too. | 59 |
| In a boundless universe / Is boundless better, boundless worse. | 60 |
| In true marriage lies / Nor equal, nor unequal: each fulfils / Defect in each, and always thought in thought, / Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow, / The single pure and perfect animal, / The two-ceil’d heart beating, with one full stroke, / Life. | 61 |
| Is there no stoning save with flint and rock? | 62 |
| It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill. | 63 |
| It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. | 64 |
| It is the flash that murders; the poor thunder never harm’d head. | 65 |
| It is the little rift within the lute / That by and by will make the music mute, / And, ever widening, slowly silence all. | 66 |
| It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, / And see the great Achilles whom we knew. | 67 |
| Jealousy / Hath in it an alchemic force to fuse / Almost into one metal love and hate. | 68 |
| Jewels five words long, / That on the stretch’d forefinger of all time / Sparkle for ever. | 69 |
| Judge thou me by what I am, / So shalt thou find me fairest. | 70 |
| Kind hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith than Norman blood. | 71 |
| Knave! because thou strikest as a knight; / Being but knave, I hate thee all the more. | 72 |
| Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. | 73 |
| Knowledge is of things we see; / And yet we trust it comes from thee, / A beam in darkness; let it grow. | 74 |
| Let her (woman) make herself her own, / To give or keep, to live, and learn, and be, / All that not harms distinctive womanhood. | 75 |
| Let knowledge grow from more to more, / But more of reverence in us dwell. | 76 |
| Let never maiden think, however fair, / She is not finer in new clothes than old. | 77 |
| Let rumours be, when did not rumours fly? | 78 |
| Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change. | 79 |
| Let there be thistles, there are grapes; / If old things, there are new; / Ten thousand broken lights and shapes, / Yet glimpses of the true. | 80 |
| Let Whig and Tory stir their blood; / There must be stormy weather; / But for some true result of good, / All parties work together. | 81 |
| Life is not as idle ore, / But iron dug from central gloom, / And heated hot with burning fears, / And dipt in baths of hissing tears, / And battered with the shocks of doom / To shape and use. | 82 |
| Little flower—if I could understand / What you are, root and all, and all in all, / I should know what God and man is. | 83 |
| Live thou! and of the grain and husk, the grape, / And ivy berry, choose; and still depart / From death to death thro’ life and life, and find / Nearer and ever nearer Him, who wrought / Not Matter, nor the finite-infinite, / But this main miracle, that thou art thou, / With power on thine own act and on the world. | 84 |
| Love lieth deep; Love dwells not in lip-depths; / Love laps his wings on either side the heart / … Absorbing all the incense of sweet thoughts, / So that they pass not to the shrine of sound. | 85 |
| Love should have some rest and pleasure in himself, / Not ever be too curious for a boon, / Too prurient for a proof against the grain / Of him ye say ye love. | 86 |
| Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chords with might; / Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out of sight. | 87 |
| Lust of gain, in the spirit of Cain, is it better or worse / Than the heart of the citizen hissing in war on his own hearthstone? | 88 |
| Make knowledge circle with the winds; / But let her herald, Reverence, fly / Before her to whatever sky / Bear seed of men and growth of minds. | 89 |
| Make thee my knight? my knights are sworn to vows / Of utter hardihood, utter gentleness, / And, loving, utter faithfulness in love, / And uttermost obedience to the king. | 90 |
| Man am I grown, a man’s work must I do. / Follow the deer? follow the Christ, the King, / Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King— / Else wherefore born? | 91 |
| Man dreams of fame while woman wakes to love. | 92 |
| Man for the field and woman for the hearth; / Man for the sword and for the needle she: / Man with the head and woman with the heart: / Man to command and woman to obey; / All else confusion. | 93 |
| Man is not as God, / But then most godlike, being most a man. | 94 |
| Man’s word is God in man. | 95 |
| Manners are not idle, but the fruit / Of loyal nature and of noble mind. | 96 |
| Men at most differ as heaven and earth, / But women, worst and best, as heaven and hell. | 97 |
| Men may rise on stepping-stones / Of their dead selves to higher things. | 98 |
| Men will forget what we suffer, and not what we do. | 99 |
| Merit lives from man to man. | 100 |
| Mockery is the fume of little hearts. | 101 |
| More things are wrought by prayer / Than this world dreams of. | 102 |
| Mother, a maiden is a tender thing, / And best by her that bore her understood. | 103 |
| My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure. | 104 |
| Nature counts nothing that she meets with base, / But lives and loves in every place. | 105 |
| Never morning wore / To evening, but some heart did break. | 106 |
| Never yet / Was noble man but made ignoble talk. | 107 |
| Nine tithes of times / Face-flatterer and backbiter are the same. | 108 |
| No compound of this earthly ball / Is like another all in all. | 109 |
| No more subtle master under heaven / Than is the maiden-passion for a maid, / Not only to keep down the base in man, / But teach high thought, and amiable words / And courtliness, and the desire of fame, / And love of truth, and all that makes a man. | 110 |
| Not once or twice in our rough island-story, / The path of duty was the way to glory: / He that walks it, only thirsting / For the right, and learns to deaden / Love of self, before his journey closes / He shall find the stubborn thistle bursting / Into glossy purples, which outredden / All voluptuous garden-roses. | 111 |
| Not to desire or admire, if a man could learn it, were more / Than to walk all day like the sultan of old in a garden of spice. | 112 |
| O guard thy roving thoughts with jealous care, for speech is but the dial-plate of thought; and every fool reads plainly in thy words what is the hour of thy thought. | 113 |
| O purblind race of miserable men! / How many among us at this very hour / Do forge a lifelong trouble for ourselves, / By taking true for false, or false for true; / Here, thro’ the feeble twilight of this world / Groping, how many, until we pass and reach / That other, where we see as we are seen! | 114 |
| O Thou, / Passionless bride, divine Tranquillity, / … Thou carest not / How roughly men may woo thee, so they win! | 115 |
| O well for him whose will is strong! / He suffers, but he will not suffer long; / He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong. | 116 |
| O yet we trust that somehow good / Will be the final goal of ill. | 117 |
| Obedience is the bond of rule. | 118 |
| Often a man’s own angry pride / Is cap-and-bells for a fool. | 119 |
| Oh,… for a man with heart, head, hand. / … Whatever they call him, what care I, / Aristocrat, democrat, autocrat—one / Who can rule and dare not lie! | 120 |
| On God and godlike men we build our trust. | 121 |
| One God, one law, one element, / And one far-off divine event, / To which the whole creation moves. | 122 |
| One shriek of hate would jar all the hymns of heaven: / True Devils with no ear, they howl in tune / With nothing but the Devil! | 123 |
| Our echoes roll from soul to soul, / And grow for ever and for ever. | 124 |
| Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great. | 125 |
| Poor men, when Yule is cold, / Must be content to sit by little fires. | 126 |
| Read my little fable: / He that runs may read. / Most can raise the flowers now, / vox all have got the seed. | 127 |
| Ring out the old, ring in the new, / Ring, happy bells, across the snow! | 128 |
| Scorn’d, to be scorn’d by one that I scorn, / Is that a matter to make me fret? / That a calamity hard to be borne? | 129 |
| Seem I not as tender to him / As any mother? / Ay, but such a one / As all day long hath rated at her child, / And vext his day, but blesses him asleep. | 130 |
| Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, / These three alone lead life to sovereign power. / Yet not for power (power of herself / Would come uncall’d for), but to live by law, / Acting the law we live by without fear; / And, because right is right, to follow right, / Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence. | 131 |
| Short swallow-flights of song, that dip / Their wings in tears and skim away. | 132 |
| Sin is too dull to see beyond himself. | 133 |
| Sir Fine-face, Sir Fair-hands; but see thou to it / That thine own fineness, Lancelot, some fine day / Undo thee not. | 134 |
| Smile (Fortune), and we smile, the lords of many lands; / Frown, and we smile, the lords of our own hands; / For man is man and master of his fate. | 135 |
| So careful of the type she seems, / So careless of the single life. | 136 |
| So much to do, / So little done, such things to be. | 137 |
| Sooner earth / Might go round heaven, and the strait girth of Time/ Inswathe the fulness of Eternity, / Than language grasp the infinite of Love. | 138 |
| Sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things. | 139 |
| Statesmen that are wise / Shape a necessity, as sculptor clay, / To their own model. | 140 |
| Strong Son of God, immortal Love, / Whom we that have not seen Thy face, / By faith, and faith alone, embrace, / Believing where we cannot prove. | 141 |
| Sweet is true love though given in vain, / And sweet is death that puts an end to pain. | 142 |
| Take the showers as they fall, / … Enough if at the end of all / A little garden blossom. | 143 |
| Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, / Tears from the depth of some divine despair / Rise in the heart and gather in the eyes, / In looking on the happy autumn fields, / And thinking of the days that are no more. | 144 |
| The bearing and the training of a child is woman’s wisdom. | 145 |
| The Churchmen fain would kill their Church, / As the Churches have killed their Christ. | 146 |
| The crowd … if they find / Some stain or blemish in a name of note, / Not grieving that their greatest are so small, / Inflate themselves with some insane delight, / And judge all Nature from her feet of clay, / Without the will to lift their eyes, and see / Her godlike head crown’d with spiritual fire / And touching other worlds. | 147 |
| The folly of all follies / Is to be love-sick for a shadow. | 148 |
| The greater man the greater courtesy. | 149 |
| The man should make the hour, not this the man. | 150 |
| The old order changeth, yielding place to new, / And God fulfils himself in many ways, / Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. | 151 |
| The proud man often is the mean. | 152 |
| The right ear, that is fill’d with dust, / Hears little of the false or just. | 153 |
| The sin that practice burns into the blood, / And not the one dark hour which brings remorse, / Will brand us, after, of whose fold we be. | 154 |
| The thrall in person may be free in soul. | 155 |
| The woman’s cause is man’s: they rise or sink / Together. | 156 |
| Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do or die. | 157 |
| There are enough unhappy on this earth. | 158 |
| There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds. | 159 |
| There’s no glory like his who saves his country. | 160 |
| They said that Love would die when Hope was gone, / And Love mourn’d long, and sorrow’d after Hope; / At last she sought out Memory, and they trod / The same old paths where Love had walk’d with Hope, / And Memory fed the soul of Love with tears. | 161 |
| They, sweet soul, that most impute a crime / Are pronest to it, and impute themselves, / Wanting the mental range; or low desire / Not to feel lowest makes them level all; / Yea, they would pare the mountain to the plain, / To leave an equal baseness. | 162 |
| Thine is the right, for thine the might. | 163 |
| Things seen are mightier than things heard. | 164 |
| Tho’ men may bicker with the things they love, / They would not make them laughable in all eyes, / Not while they loved them. | 165 |
| Tho’ world on world in myriad myriads roll / Round us, each with different powers, / And other form of life than ours, / What know we greater than the soul? | 166 |
| Though much is taken, much abides. | 167 |
| ’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all. | 168 |
| ’Tis only noble to be good; / Kind hearts are more than coronets, / And simple faith than Norman blood. | 169 |
| To do him any wrong was to beget / A kindness from him, for his heart was rich, / Of such fine mould, that if you sow’d therein / The seed of Hate, it blossom’d Charity. | 170 |
| Too much mercy is want of mercy. | 171 |
| Too much wit / Makes the world rotten. | 172 |
| Trust me not at all or all in all. | 173 |
| Truth, or clothed or naked let it be. | 174 |
| Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown; / With that wild wheel we go not up or down; / Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great. | 175 |
| Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all. | 176 |
| Unto him who works, and feels he works, / This same grand year (the Golden Year) is ever at the doors. | 177 |
| Was, and is, and will be, are but “is.” | 178 |
| We are ancients of the earth / And in the morning of the times. | 179 |
| We cannot be kind to each other here for an hour; / We whisper, and hint, and chuckle, and grin at a brother’s shame; / However we brave it out, we men are a little breed. | 180 |
| We needs must love the highest when we see it, / Not Lancelot, nor another. | 181 |
| Weeds make dunghills gracious. | 182 |
| What are men better than sheep or goats, / That nourish a blind life within the brain, / If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer / Both for themselves and those who call them friend? | 183 |
| What rights are his that dare not strike for them? | 184 |
| What was once to me / Mere matter of the fancy, now has grown / The vast necessity of heart and life. | 185 |
| Who are wise in love, love most, say least. | 186 |
| Who shuts love out shall be shut out from love. | 187 |
| Who walks through fire will hardly heed the smoke. | 188 |
| Whose faith has centre everywhere, / Nor cares to fix itself to form. | 189 |
| Woman is not undevelopt man, / But diverse; could we make her as the man, / Sweet love were slain: his dearest bond is this / Not like to like, but like in difference. | 190 |
| Woman is the lesser man. | 191 |
| Woman’s cause is man’s; they rise or sink / Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free. | 192 |
| Words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the soul within. | 193 |
| Worse than being fool’d / Of others, is to fool one’s self. | 194 |
| Ye think the rustic cackle of your bourg / The murmur of the world. | 195 |
| Yea, let all good things await / Him who cares not to be great, / But as he serves or serves the state. | 196 |
| Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, / And the thoughts of men are widen’d by the process of the suns. | 197 |
| Yet this grief / Is added to the griefs the great must bear, / That howsoever much they may desire / Silence, they cannot weep behind a cloud. | 198 |
| You said your say; / Mine answer was my deed. | 199 |
| You wise, / To call him shamed, who is but overthrown? | 200 |
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