237 quotes
Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece,
Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease.
Memorial Verses (1852)
He went; his piping took a troubled sound
Of storms that rage outside our happy ground;
He could not wait their passing, he is dead!
Thyrsis (1866)
Rustum...hurl’d
His spear: down from the shoulder, down it came,
As on some partridge in the corn a hawk
That long has tower’d in the airy clouds
Drops like a plummet.
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
Wordsworth has gone from us — and ye,
Ah, may ye feel his voice as we!
He too upon a wintry clime
Had fallen — on this iron time
Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears.
Memorial Verses (1852)
Are ye too changed, ye hills?
See, ’tis no foot of unfamiliar men
Tonight from Oxford up your pathway strays!
Here came I often, often, in old days;
Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then.
Thyrsis (1866)
Eutrapelia. "A happy and gracious flexibility," Pericles calls this quality of the Athenians...lucidity of thought, clearness and propriety of language, freedom from prejudice and freedom from stiffness, openness of mind, amiability of manners.
Irish Essays (1882)
But be his
My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;
Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole:
The mellow glory of the Attic stage.
The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849)
Creep into thy narrow bed,
Creep, and let no more be said!
Vain thy onset! all stands fast.
Thou thyself must break at last
New Poems (1867)
Where great whales come sailing by,
Sail and sail, with unshut eye,
Round the world for ever and aye.
When did music come this way?
Children dear, was it yesterday?
The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849)
And the first grey of morning fill’d the east,
And the fog rose out of the Oxus stream.
But all the Tartar camp along the stream
Was hush’d, and still the men were plunged in sleep.
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
And as long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration, as to the people who have had the sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest; and in hearing and reading the words Israel has uttered for us, carers for conduct will find a glow and a force they could find nowhere else.
Literature and Dogma (1873)
long files of horse, they stream’d:
As when, some grey November morn, the files,
In marching order spread.
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
as the vast tide
Of the bright rocking Ocean sets to shore
At the full moon.
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.
Preface to God and the Bible (1875)
No horse's cry was that, most like the roar
Of some pain'd desert-lion, who all day
Hath trail'd the hunter's javelin in his side,
And comes at night to die upon the sand.
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
What helps it now, that Byron bore,
With haughty scorn which mock'd the smart,
Through Europe to the Ætolian shore
The pageant of his bleeding heart?
That thousands counted every groan,
And Europe made his woe her own?
Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (1855)
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
New Poems (1867)
Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal'd
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves — and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
New Poems (1867)
for it is not yet clear dawn.
Speak! is there news, or any night alarm?
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)