237 quotes
Then gazing up 'mid the dim pillars high,
The foliaged marble forest where ye lie,
Hush, ye will say, it is eternity!
This is the glimmering verge of heaven, and there
The columns of the heavenly palaces.
O born in days when wits were fresh and clear,
And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;
Before this strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims,
Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsied hearts, was rife —
Fly hence, our contact fear!
The Scholar-Gipsy (1853)
Of these two literatures, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge — theology, philosophy, history, art, science — to see the object as in itself it really is.
On Translating Homer (1861)
Yes: in the sea of life enisl’d,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The horse, whom Rustum on a foray once
Did in Bokhara by the river find
A colt beneath its dam, and drove him home
And reared him, a bright bay with lofty crest.
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind?
He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men,
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen,
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind.
The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849)
The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
New Poems (1867)
his head droop’d low,
His limbs grew slack; motionless, white, he lay—
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
and now
The Tartars built there Peran-Wisa’s tent.
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
his own early youth,
And all its bounding rapture
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
But, ah! she gave me never a look,
For her eyes were sealed to the holy book.
Loud prays the priest; shut stands the door.
Come away, children, call no more!
Come away, come down, call no more!
The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849)
Thee at the ferry Oxford riders blithe,
Returning home on summer-nights, have met
Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe,
Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet,
As the punt’s rope chops round.
The Scholar-Gipsy (1853)
Coldly, sadly descends
The autumn evening. The Field
Strewn with its dank yellow drifts
Of wither’d leaves, and the elms,
Fade into dimness apace,
Silent;—hardly a shout
From a few boys late at their play!
Rugby Chapel (1867)
My father, whom the robber Afghans vex,
And clip his borders short, and drive his herds,
And he has none to guard his weak old age:
There would I go, and hang my armour up,
And with my great name fence that weak old man.
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry,
From the wet field, through the vext garden-trees,
Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze:
The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I!
Thyrsis (1866)
I met a preacher there I knew, and said,
Ill and overworked, how fare you in this scene?
Bravely! said he; for I of late have been
Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.
Even in our poor old country, with its aristocratic class materialized, its middle class vulgarized, its lower class brutalized, there are to be found individuals, as I have again and again said, lovers of the humane life, lovers of perfection, who emerge in all classes, and who, while they are more or less in conflict with the present, point to a better future.
Civilization in the United States (1888)
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us, to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why, then, should we desire to be deceived?
Misattributed
Truth illuminates and gives joy; and it is by the band of joy, not of pleasure, that men’s spirits are indissolubly held.
Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)