| |
| A change came o’er the spirit of my dream. | 1 |
| A thousand years scarce serve to form a state; / An hour may lay it in the dust. | 2 |
| All went as merry as a marriage-bell. | 3 |
| And Mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair. | 4 |
| “Arcades ambo,” id est, blackguards both. | 5 |
| As falls the dew on quenchless sands, / Blood only serves to wash ambition’s hands. | 6 |
| Battle’s magnificently stern array. | 7 |
| But there are wanderers o’er eternity, / Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor’d ne’er shall be. | 8 |
| But words are things, and a small drop of ink, / Falling, like dew, upon a thought, produces / That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think. | 9 |
| Can despots compass aught that hails their sway? / Or call with truth one span of earth their own, / Save that wherein at last they crumble bone by bone? | 10 |
| Cervantes smiled Spain’s chivalry away. | 11 |
| Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded / That all the apostles would have done as they did. | 12 |
| Constant thought will overflow in words unconsciously. | 13 |
| Critics all are ready made. | 14 |
| Danger levels man and brute, / And all are fellows in their need. | 15 |
| Dead scandals form good subjects for dissection. | 16 |
| Death is but what the haughty brave, / The weak must bear, the wretch must crave. | 17 |
| Death shuns the wretch who fain the blow would meet. | 18 |
| Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, / And yet a third of life is passed in sleep. | 19 |
| Deformity is daring; it is its essence to overtake mankind by heart and soul, and make itself the equal, ay, the superior of the rest. | 20 |
| |
|
|
| |
| Despair defies even despotism; there is that in my heart would make its way through hosts with levelled spears. | 21 |
| Dreams in their development have breath / And tears and torture and the touch of joy; / They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts; / They take a weight from off our waking toils; / They do divide our being; they become a portion of ourselves as of our time, / And look like heralds of eternity. | 22 |
| Dust long outlasts the storied stone. | 23 |
| Ennui is a growth of English root, though nameless in our language. | 24 |
| Enough—no foreign foe could quell / Thy soul, till from itself it fell; / Yes, self-abasement paved the way / To villain bonds and despot sway. | 25 |
| Extreme in all things! hadst thou been betwixt, / Thy throne had still been thine, or never been. | 26 |
| Fare thee well! and if for ever, / Still for ever fare thee well! / E’en though unforgiving, never / ’Gainst thee shall my heart rebel. | 27 |
| Fate made me what I am, may make me nothing; / But either that or nothing must I be; / I will not live degraded. | 28 |
| Few men dare show their thoughts of worst or best. | 29 |
| Folly loves the martyrdom of fame. | 30 |
| Fools are my theme; let satire be my song. | 31 |
| For Freedom’s battle, once begun, / Bequeath’d by bleeding sire to son, / Though baffled oft, is ever won. | 32 |
| For glances beget ogles, ogles sighs, / Sighs wishes, wishes words, and words a letter; / And then God knows what mischief may arise / When love links two young people in one fetter. | 33 |
| For pleasures past I do not grieve, / Nor perils gathering near; / My greatest grief is that I leave / Nothing that claims a tear. | 34 |
| Friendship is love without its wings. | 35 |
| Full many a stoic eye and aspect stern / Masks hearts where grief has little left to learn; / And many a withering thought lies hid, not lost, / In smiles that least befit who wears them most. | 36 |
| Glory long has made the sages smile, / ’Tis something, nothing, words, illusion, wind, / Depending more upon the historian’s style / Than on the name a person leaves behind. | 37 |
| Grief should be the instructor of the wise; / Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most / Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, / The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life. | 38 |
| Had sigh’d to many, though he loved but one. | 39 |
| Here’s a sigh for those who love me, / And a smile for those who hate, / And whatever sky’s above me, / Here’s a heart for every fate. | 40 |
| Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not, / Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow? | 41 |
| I awoke one morning and found myself famous. | 42 |
| I have seen some nations, like overloaded asses, / Kick off their burdens, meaning the higher classes. | 43 |
| I know no evil death can show, which life / Has not already shown to those who live / Embodied longest. | 44 |
| I live not in myself, but I become / Portion of that around me; and to me / High mountains are a feeling. | 45 |
| “I must sleep now.” His last words. | 46 |
| In her first passion, woman loves her lover, / In all the others, all she loves is love. | 47 |
| In hope to merit heaven by making earth a hell. | 48 |
| In life there is no present. | 49 |
| In the balance, hero dust / Is vile as vulgar clay: / Thou, mortality, art just / To all that pass away. | 50 |
| It were easier to stop Euphrates at its source than one tear of a true and tender heart. | 51 |
| Jealousy dislikes the world to know it. | 52 |
| Joy’s recollection is no longer joy, while sorrow’s memory is a sorrow still. | 53 |
| Know ye not who would be free themselves must strike the blow? / By their right arms the conquest must be wrought. | 54 |
| Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle / Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime; / Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle, / Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime? | 55 |
| Knowledge is not happiness, and science but an exchange of ignorance for that which is another kind of ignorance. | 56 |
| Laughter leaves us doubly serious shortly after. | 57 |
| Let’s not unman each other—part at once; / All farewells should be sudden when for ever, / Else they make an eternity of moments, / And clog the last sad sands of life with tears. | 58 |
| Life’s enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim. | 59 |
| Lord of himself, that heritage of woe. | 60 |
| Love has made its best interpreter a sigh. | 61 |
| Love is old, old as eternity, but not outworn; with each new being born or to be born. | 62 |
| Love is vanity, / Selfish in its beginning as its end. | 63 |
| Love on his lips and hatred in his heart: / His motto—constancy, his creed—to part. | 64 |
| Love will find its way / Through paths where wolves would fear to prey. | 65 |
| Maidens, like moths, are ever caught with glare, / And Mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair. | 66 |
| Mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair. | 67 |
| Man must serve his time to every trade / Save censure; critics all are ready made. | 68 |
| Man! / Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and a tear. | 69 |
| Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart; / ’Tis woman’s whole existence. | 70 |
| Marriage is the bloom or blight of all men’s happiness. | 71 |
| Melancholy spreads itself betwixt heaven and earth, like envy between man and man, and is an everlasting mist. | 72 |
| Men are the sport of circumstances, when the circumstances seem the sport of men. | 73 |
| Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure. | 74 |
| Midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men, / To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess, / And roam along, the world’s tired denizen, / With none who bless us, none whom we can bless; / … This is to be alone; this, this is solitude! | 75 |
| My days are in the yellow leaf; / The flowers and fruits of love are gone; / The worm, the canker, and the grief / Are mine alone. | 76 |
| No hand can make the clock strike for me the hours that are past. | 77 |
| No words suffice the secret soul to show, / For truth denies all eloquence to woe. | 78 |
| Noble spirits war not with the dead. | 79 |
| None are all evil; quickening round his heart, / One softer feeling would not yet depart. | 80 |
| None are so desolate but something dear, / Dearer than self, possesses or possess’d / A thought, and claims the homage of a tear. | 81 |
| Not all that heralds rake from coffin’d clay, / Nor florid prose, nor honeyed lines of rhyme, / Can blazon evil deeds or consecrate a crime. | 82 |
| Nothing so difficult as a beginning / In poesy, except perhaps the end; / For oftentimes when Pegasus seems winning / The race, he sprains a wing, and down we tend, / Like Lucifer, when hurl’d from heaven for sinning. | 83 |
| Oh, Love! no habitant of earth thou art— / An unseen seraph, we believe in thee. | 84 |
| Oh, Love, how perfect is thy mystic art, / Strengthening the weak, and trampling on the strong! | 85 |
| Our thoughts take wildest flight / Even at the moment when they should array themselves in pensive order. | 86 |
| Parting day / Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues / With a new colour as it grasps away, / The last still loveliest, till—’tis gone, and all is gray. | 87 |
| Perhaps the early grave / Which men weep over may be meant to save. | 88 |
| Prolonged endurance tames the bold. | 89 |
| Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! / Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain; / Man marks the earth with ruin,—his control / Stops with the shore. | 90 |
| Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer. | 91 |
| Science / Is but an exchange of ignorance for that / Which is another kind of ignorance. | 92 |
| Shrine of the mighty! can it be / That this is all remains of thee? | 93 |
| Sleep hath its own world, / A boundary between the things misnamed / Death and Existence. | 94 |
| Smiles form the channel of a future tear. | 95 |
| Snatch from the ashes of your sires / The embers of their former fires; / And he who in the strife expires / Will add to theirs a name of fear / That tyranny shall quake to hear, / And leave his sons a hope, a fame, / They too would rather die than shame. | 96 |
| Sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most must mourn the deepest over the fatal truth, the tree of knowledge is not that of life. | 97 |
| Such hath been—shall be—beneath the sun, / That many still must labour for the one. | 98 |
| Such is the aspect of this shore; / ’Tis Greece, but living Greece no more! / So coldly sweet, so deadly fair, / We start, for soul is wanting there. | 99 |
| Suspicion is a heavy armour, and with its own weight impedes more than protects. | 100 |
| Tempted Fate will leave the loftiest star. | 101 |
| That low vice curiosity. | 102 |
| The commencement of atonement is / The sense of its necessity. | 103 |
| The common crowd but see the gloom / Of wayward deeds and fitting doom; / The close observer can espy / A noble soul and lineage high. | 104 |
| The dome of thought, the palace of the soul. | 105 |
| The drying up a single tear has more / Of honest fame than shedding seas of gore. | 106 |
| The heart will break, yet brokenly live on. | 107 |
| The many still must labour for the one! It is Nature’s doom. | 108 |
| The mind can make / Substance, and people planets of its own / With beings brighter than have been, and give / A breath to forms that can outlive all flesh. | 109 |
| The night shows stars and women in a better light. | 110 |
| The tree of knowledge is not that of life. | 111 |
| There is a pleasure in the pathless woods; / There is a rapture on the lonely shore; / There is society, where none intrudes, / By the deep sea, and music in its roar; / I love not the man the less, / But Nature more. | 112 |
| There is music in all things, if men had ears. | 113 |
| There is no sterner moralist than pleasure. | 114 |
| There is no traitor like him whose domestic treason plants the poniard within the breast which trusted to his truth. | 115 |
| There’s a courage which grows out of fear. | 116 |
| There’s music in the sighing of a reed; / There’s music in the gushing of a rill; / There’s music in all things, if men had ears. | 117 |
| There’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away. | 118 |
| Think’st thou existence doth depend on time? / It doth; but actions are our epochs. | 119 |
| Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow; / Such as creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now. | 120 |
| ’Tis pleasant, sure, to see one’s name in print; / A book’s a book, although there’s nothing in’t. | 121 |
| Truth in its own essence cannot be / But good. | 122 |
| Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction. | 123 |
| Unknell’d, uncoffin’d, and unknown. | 124 |
| We are slaves, / The greatest as the meanest—nothing rests / Upon our will … / And when we think we lead, we are most led. | 125 |
| We loathe what none are left to share; / Even bless ’twere woe alone to bear. | 126 |
| We, who name ourselves its (the world) sovereigns, we, / Half dust, half deity, alike unfit / To sink or soar. | 127 |
| What a strange thing man is! and what a stranger / Is woman! | 128 |
| What exile from himself can flee? | 129 |
| What is writ is writ. | 130 |
| Whatsoever thine ill, / It must be borne, and these wild starts are useless. | 131 |
| Where there is mystery, it is generally supposed that there must also be evil. | 132 |
| Where’er we tread, ’tis haunted, holy ground. | 133 |
| Who ascends to mountain-tops, shall find / The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow. | 134 |
| Who loves, raves. | 135 |
| Who surpasses or subdues mankind / Must look down on the hate of those below. | 136 |
| Who track the steps of glory to the grave. | 137 |
| “Whom the gods love die young,” was said of yore. | 138 |
| With just enough of learning to misquote. | 139 |
| With none who bless us, none whom we can bless— / This is to be alone; this, this is solitude! | 140 |
| Words are things, and a small drop of ink, / Falling like dew upon a thought, produces / That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think. | 141 |
| Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven!… In our aspirations to be great, / Our destinies o’erleap their mortal state, / And claim a kindred with you; for ye are / A beauty and a mystery, and create / In us such love and reverence from afar, / That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star. | 142 |
| Years steal / Fire from the mind as vigour from the limb, / And life’s enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim. | 143 |
| Yes, there are things we must dream and dare, / And execute ere thought be half aware. | 144 |
| |
