Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

The moon of Mahomet

Arose, and it shall set;

While, blazoned as on heaven's immortal noon,

The cross leads generations on.

The world's great age begins anew,

The golden years return,

The earth doth like a snake renew

Her winter weeds outworn.

What! alive, and so bold, O earth?

Hellas. Line 221.

Line 1060.

Written on hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon.

Given or returned.

All love is sweet,

Common as light is love,

And its familiar voice wearies not ever.

They who inspire it most are fortunate,
As I am now; but those who feel it most
Are happier still.1

Prometheus Unbound. Act ii. Sc. 5.

Those who inflict must suffer, for they see
The work of their own hearts, and that must be
Our chastisement or recompense.

Julian and Maddalo. Line 482.
Most wretched men

Are cradled into poetry by wrong:

They learn in suffering what they teach in song.2

I could lie down like a tired child,

And weep away the life of care

Which I have borne, and yet must bear.

Line 544.

Stanzas written in Dejection, near Naples. Stanza 4.

Peter was dull; he was at first

Dull,

oh so dull, so very dull! Whether he talked, wrote, or rehearsed,

Still with this dulness was he cursed!

Dull, beyond all conception, dull.

Peter Bell the Third. Part vii. xii.

1 The pleasure of love is in loving. We are much happier in the passion

we feel than in that we inspire.

ROCHEFOUCAULD: Maxim 259.

2 See Butler, page 216.

[blocks in formation]

Of some world far from ours,

Where music and moonlight and feeling

Are one. To Jane. The keen Stars were twinkling.

[blocks in formation]

Power, like a desolating pestilence,

Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,

Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
A mechanized automaton.

1 See Swift, page 292.

222.

Heaven's ebon vault

Studded with stars unutterably bright,

Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls,
Seems like a canopy which love has spread

To curtain her sleeping world.

Queen Mab. iv.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.1 A Defence of Poetry.

J. HOWARD PAYNE. 1792-1852.

'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home; 2
A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there,
Which sought through the world is ne'er met with else-
where.

An exile from home splendour dazzles in vain,
Oh give me my lowly thatched cottage again;
The birds singing gayly, that came at my call,

Give me them, and that peace of mind dearer than all.
Home, Sweet Home. (From the opera of "Clari, the
Maid of Milan.")

SEBA SMITH. 1792-1868.

The cold winds swept the mountain-height,
And pathless was the dreary wild,
And 'mid the cheerless hours of night

A mother wandered with her child:
As through the drifting snows she press'd,
The babe was sleeping on her breast.

1 See Coleridge, page 504.

The Snow Storm.

2 Home is home, though it be never so homely - CLARKE: Parœmiologia, p. 101. (1639.)

JOHN KEBLE. 1792-1866.

The trivial round, the common task,
Would furnish all we ought to ask.

Why should we faint and fear to live alone,
Since all alone, so Heaven has willed, we die?
Nor even the tenderest heart, and next our own,
Knows half the reasons why we smile and sigh.

Morning.

The Christian Year. Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity.
'Tis sweet, as year by year we lose
Friends out of sight, in faith to muse
How grows in Paradise our store.

Abide with me from morn till eve,
For without Thee I cannot live;
Abide with me when night is nigh,
For without Thee I dare not die.

Burial of the Dead.

Evening.

FELICIA D. HEMANS. 1794-1835.

The stately homes of England,

How beautiful they stand,
Amid their tall ancestral trees,

O'er all the pleasant land!

The breaking waves dashed high

The Homes of England.

On a stern and rock-bound coast,
And the woods against a stormy sky

Their giant branches tossed.

Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers.

What sought they thus afar?

Bright jewels of the mine,
The wealth of seas, the spoils of war?
They sought a faith's pure shrine.

Ibid.

Ay, call it holy ground,

The soil where first they trod:

They have left unstained what there they found,— Freedom to worship God.

Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers.

Through the laburnum's dropping gold
Rose the light shaft of Orient mould,
And Europe's violets, faintly sweet,
Purpled the mossbeds at its feet.

They grew in beauty side by side,
They filled one home with glee:
Their graves are severed far and wide
By mount and stream and sea.

The Palm-Tree.

The Graves of a Household.

Alas for love, if thou wert all,
And naught beyond, O Earth!

The boy stood on the burning deck,
Whence all but him had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead.

Leaves have their time to fall,

Ibid.

Casabianca.

And flowers to wither at the north-wind's breath,

And stars to set; but all,

Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O Death!

[blocks in formation]
« AnteriorContinuar »