237 quotes
Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn
Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?
Parting (1852)
And sigh that one thing only has been lent
To youth and age in common,—discontent.
A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.
Essays in Criticism, second series (1888)
Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he
Who finds himself, loses his misery.
I keep saying, Shakspeare, Shakspeare, you are as obscure as life is.
The East bowed low before the blast,
In patient deep disdain;
She let the legions thunder past,
And plunged in thought again.
Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.
Essays in Criticism, second series (1888)
Eyes too expressive to be blue,
Too lovely to be grey.
France, fam'd in all great arts, in none supreme.
The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849)
Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill.
The Scholar-Gipsy (1853)
The line of festal light in Christ-Church hall.
The Scholar-Gipsy (1853)
Six years—six little years—six drops of time.
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)
And then he thinks he knows
The Hills where his life rose,
And the Sea where it goes.
Ennobling this dull pomp, the life of kings,
By contemplation of diviner things.
The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849)
Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought.
The Functions of Criticism at the Present Time (1864)
Not milder is the general lot
Because our spirits have forgot,
In action’s dizzying eddy whirl’d,
The something that infects the world.
The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems (1849)
They follow’d me, my hope, my fame, my star.
Sohrab and Rustum (1853)
English civilization — the humanizing, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society — that is what interests me.
Irish Essays (1882)
The crown of literature is poetry.
Essays in Criticism, second series (1888)