Great Throughts Treasury

"Eyes too expressive to be blue, too lovely to be grey."

"For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry."

"Fenced early in this cloistral round of reverie, of shade, of prayer, how should we grow in other ground? How can we flower in foreign air? Mass, banners, pass, and bugles, cease; and leave our desert to its peace!"

"Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, his sad lucidity of soul."

"For rigorous teachers seized my youth, and purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, show'd me the high, white star of Truth, there bade me gaze, and there aspire. Even now their whispers pierce the gloom: what dost thou in this living tomb?"

"For science, God is simply the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfill the law of their being."

"For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment."

"For what can give a finer example of that frankness and manly self- confidence which our great public schools, and none of them so much as Eton, are supposed to inspire, of that buoyant ease in holding up one's head, speaking out what is in one's mind, and flinging off all sheepishness and awkwardness, than to see an Eton assistant-master offering in fact himself as evidence that to combine boarding-house- keeping with teaching is a good thing, and his brother as evidence that to train and race little boys for competitive examinations is a good thing?"

"France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme."

"For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule."

"Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an affair of genius; therefore a nation whose spirit is characterized by energy may well be imminent in poetry - and we have Shakespeare."

"Genius is mainly an affair of energy."

"Go, for they call you, shepherd, from the hill."

"Friends who set forth at our side, falter, are lost in the storm. We, we only, are left!"

"From whose floor the new-bathed stars emerge, and shine upon the Aral sea."

"God's wisdom and god's goodness!--ah, but fools mis-define thee, till god knows them no more. Wisdom and goodness they are god!--what schools have yet so much as heard this simpler lore. This no saint preaches, and this no church rules: 'tis in the desert, now and heretofore."

"Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece, long since, saw Byron?s struggle cease."

"Gray, a born poet, fell upon an age of reason."

"Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration."

"Had Shakespeare and Milton lived in the atmosphere of modern feeling, had they had the multitude of new thoughts and feelings to deal with a modern has, I think it likely the style of each would have been far less curious and exquisite. For in a man style is the saying in the best way what you have to say. The what you have to say depends on your age. In the 17th century it was a smaller harvest than now, and sooner to be reaped; and therefore to its reaper was left time to stow it more finely and curiously. Still more was this the case in the ancient world. The poet's matter being the hitherto experience of the world, and his own, increases with every century."

"He bears the seed of ruin in himself."

"Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret."

"Greatness is a spiritual condition."

"He [Chaucer] lacks the high seriousness of the great classics, and therewith an important part of their virtue."

"Hark! Ah, the nightingale-- the tawny-throated! Hark from that moonlit cedar what a burst! What triumph! Hark!--what pain! . . . . Again--thou hearest? Eternal passion! Eternal pain!"

"He went; his piping took a troubled sound of storms that rage outside our happy ground."

"He spoke, and loos'd our heart in tears. He laid us as we lay at birth On the cool flowery lap of earth."

"'He knows', says Hebraism, 'his Bible!'-whenever we hear this said, we may, without any elaborate defense of culture, content ourselves with answering simply: 'No man, who knows nothing else, knows even his Bible.'"

"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!"

"He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the "Iliad" itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible."

"Hear it, O Thyrsis, still our tree is there!? Ah, vain! These English fields, this upland dim, these brambles pale with mist engarlanded, that lone, sky-pointing tree, are not for him; to a boon southern country he is fled, and now in happier air, wandering with the great Mother?s train divine (And purer or more subtle soul than thee, I trow, the mighty Mother doth not see) within a folding of the Apennine."

"Her cabin?d, ample Spirit, it flutter?d and fail?d for breath. To-night it doth inherit the vasty Hall of Death."

"His expression may often be called bald? but it is bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur."

"Hither and thither spins the wind-borne mirroring soul, a thousand glimpses wins, and never sees a whole."

"I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world."

"I am past thirty, and three parts iced over."

"I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday; I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today."

"Here is the element or power of conduct, of intellect and knowledge, of beauty, and of social life and manners, and all needful to build up a complete human life. - We have instincts responding to them all, and requiring them all, and we are perfectly civilized only when all these instincts of our nature - all these elements in our civilization have been adequately recognized and satisfied."

"How many minds--almost all the great ones--were formed in secrecy and solitude!"

"Home of lost causes [Oxford], and forsaken beliefs and unpopular names and impossible loyalties."

"However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications."

"How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Again ? thou hearest? Eternal passion! Eternal pain!"

"Humid the air! Leafless, yet soft as spring. The tender purple spray on copse and briers! And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, she needs not June for beauty's heightening. Lovely all the time she lies."

"I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture."

"I fell her finger light laid pausefully upon life's headlong train;? the foot less prompt to meet the morning dew, the heart less bounding at emotion new, and hope, once crush'd, less quick to spring again."

"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."

"I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is."

"I must not say that she was true, Yet let me say that she was fair; And they, that lovely face who view, They should not ask if truth be there."

"If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any great class and description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and to provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either fully understand its wants, or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success."

"If ever there comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of humankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known."