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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.[566:2]
Julian and Maddalo. Line 544.
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne, and yet must bear.
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. xi.
[567]
A lovely lady, garmented in light
From her own beauty.
The Witch of Atlas. Stanza 5.
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Music, when soft Voices die.
I love tranquil solitude
And such society
As is quiet, wise, and good.
Rarely, rarely comest Thou.
Sing again, with your dear voice revealing
A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.
To Jane. The keen Stars were twinkling.
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.
One Word is too often profaned.
You lie—under a mistake,[567:1]
For this is the most civil sort of lie
That can be given to a man's face. I now
Say what I think.
Translation of Calderon's Magico Prodigioso. Scene i.
How wonderful is Death!
Death and his brother Sleep.
Queen Mab. i.
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.
Queen Mab. iii.
[568]
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.[568:1]
A Defence of Poetry.
[565:1] See Bacon, page 166.
[566:1] The pleasure of love is in loving. We are much happier in the passion we feel than in that we inspire.—Rochefoucauld: Maxim 259.
[566:2] See Butler, page 216.
[567:1] See Swift, page 292.
[568:1] See Coleridge, page 504.
J. HOWARD PAYNE. 1792-1852.'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there 's no place like home;[568:2]
A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there,
Which sought through the world is ne'er met with elsewhere.
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.")
[568:2] Home is home, though it be never so homely.—Clarke: Parœmiologia, p. 101. (1639.)
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.
The Snow Storm.
[569]
JOHN KEBLE. 1792-1866.The trivial round, the common task,
Would furnish all we ought to ask.
Morning.
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.
The Christian Year. Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity.
'T is sweet, as year by year we lose
Friends out of sight, in faith to muse
How grows in Paradise our store.
Burial of the Dead.
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.
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 Homes of England.
The breaking waves dashed high
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.
Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers.
[570]
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.
The Palm-Tree.
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 Graves of a Household.
Alas for love, if thou wert all,
And naught beyond, O Earth!
The Graves of a Household.
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.
Casabianca.
Leaves have their time to fall,
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!
The Hour of Death.
Come to the sunset tree!
The day is past and gone;
The woodman's axe lies free,
And the reaper's work is done.
Tyrolese Evening Song.
In the busy haunts of men.
Tale of the Secret Tribunal. Part i.
Calm on the bosom of thy God,
Fair spirit, rest thee now!
Siege of Valencia. Scene ix.
[571]
Oh, call my brother back to me!
I cannot play alone:
The summer comes with flower and bee,—
Where is my brother gone?
The Child's First Grief.
I have looked on the hills of the stormy North,
And the larch has hung his tassels forth.
The Voice of Spring.
I had a hat. It was not all a hat,—
Part of the brim was gone:
Yet still I wore it on.
Rhine Song of the German Soldiers after Victory.
EDWARD EVERETT. 1794-1865.When I am dead, no pageant train
Shall waste their sorrows at my bier,
Nor worthless pomp of homage vain
Stain it with hypocritic tear.
Alaric the Visigoth.
You shall not pile, with servile toil,
Your monuments upon my breast,
Nor yet within the common soil
Lay down the wreck of power to rest,
Where man can boast that he has trod
On him that was "the scourge of God."
Alaric the Visigoth.
No gilded dome swells from the lowly roof to catch the morning or evening beam; but the love and gratitude of united America settle upon it in one eternal sunshine. From beneath that humble roof went forth the intrepid and unselfish warrior, the magistrate who knew no glory but his country's good; to that he returned, happiest when his work was done. There he lived in noble simplicity, there he died in glory and peace. While it stands, the latest generations of the grateful children of America will make this pilgrimage [572]to it as to a shrine; and when it shall fall, if fall it must, the memory and the name of Washington shall shed an eternal glory on the spot.
Oration on the Character of Washington.
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 1794-1878.Here the free spirit of mankind, at length,
Throws its last fetters off; and who shall place
A limit to the giant's unchained strength,
Or curb his swiftness in the forward race?
The Ages. xxxiii.
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language.
Thanatopsis.
Go forth under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings.
Thanatopsis.
The hills,
Rock-ribbed, and ancient as the sun.
Thanatopsis.
Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste.
Thanatopsis.
All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.
Thanatopsis.
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves[572:1]
To that mysterious realm where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one that wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
Thanatopsis.
[573]
The groves were God's first temples.
A Forest Hymn.
The stormy March has come at last,
With winds and clouds and changing skies;
I hear the rushing of the blast
That through the snowy valley flies.
March.
But 'neath yon crimson tree
Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame,
Nor mark, within its roseate canopy,
Her blush of maiden shame.
Autumn Woods.
The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds and naked woods and meadows brown and sear.
The Death of the Flowers.
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.
The Death of the Flowers.
Loveliest of lovely things are they
On earth that soonest pass away.
The rose that lives its little hour
Is prized beyond the sculptured flower.
A Scene on the Banks of the Hudson.
The victory of endurance born.
The Battle-Field.
Truth crushed to earth shall rise again,—
The eternal years of God are hers;
But Error, wounded, writhes with pain,
And dies among his worshippers.
The Battle-Field.
[572:1] The edition of 1821 read,—
The innumerable caravan that moves
To the pale realms of shade, where each shall take.
JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE. 1795-1820.When Freedom from her mountain-height
Unfurled her standard to the air,
She tore the azure robe of night,
And set the stars of glory there.
She mingled with its gorgeous dyes
The milky baldric of the skies,
[574]And striped its pure, celestial white
With streakings of the morning light.
Flag of the free heart's hope and home!
By angel hands to valour given!
Thy stars have lit the welkin dome,
And all thy hues were born in heaven.
Forever float that standard sheet!
Where breathes the foe but falls before us,
With Freedom's soil beneath our feet,
And Freedom's banner streaming o'er us?
The American Flag.
JOHN KEATS. 1795-1821.A thing of beauty is a joy forever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.
Endymion. Book i.
He ne'er is crown'd
With immortality, who fears to follow
Where airy voices lead.
Endymion. Book ii.
To sorrow
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