Great Throughts Treasury

"He has outsoared the shadow of our night; envy and calumny and hate and pain, and that unrest which men miscall delight, can touch him not and torture not again; from the contagion of the world's slow stain, he is secure."

"Hail to thee blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert, that from Heaven, or near it, pourest thy full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art."

"He is made one with Nature: there is heard"

"He is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely."

"He wanders, like a day-appearing dream,"

"He will watch from dawn to gloom the lake-reflected sun illume the yellow bees in the ivy-bloom, nor heed nor see, what things they be; but from these create he can forms more real than living man, nurslings of immortality!"

"Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam."

"He is made one with Nature: there is heard his voice in all her music, from the moan of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird."

"Hell is a city much like London-- A populous and a smoky city; there are all sorts of people undone, and there is little or no fun done; small justice shown, and still less pity? Lawyers--judges--old hobnobbers are there--bailiffs?chancellors, Bishops--great and little robbers-- Rhymesters--pamphleteers--stock-jobbers-- Men of glory in the wars."

"Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower?and this is the burden of the curse of Babel."

"Here I swear, and as I break my oath may eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge. Oh, how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon; to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again - I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry."

"His fine wit makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it."

"His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth and pregnant with a lightning which has yet found no conductor."

"Higher still and higher from the earth thou springest, like a cloud of fire; the blue deep thou wingest, and singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest."

"Hope will make thee young; for Hope and Youth are children of one mother."

"How many a rustic Milton has passed by, stifling the speechless longings of his heart, in unremitting drudgery and care! How many a vulgar Cato has compelled his energies, no longer tameless then, to mold a pin, or fabricate a nail!"

"How beautiful this night! the balmiest sigh which Vernal Zephyrs breathe in evening's ear were discord to the speaking quietude that wraps this moveless scene. 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."

"His voice in all her music, from the moan"

"Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites our curiosity and it appears interesting. In fighting for his God everyone, in fact, fights only for the interest of his own vanity, which, of all the passions produced bye the mal-organization of society, is the quickest to take offense, and the most capable of committing the greatest follies."

"I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, from the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid in their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken the sweet buds every one, when rocked to rest on their mother's breast, as she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, and whiten the green plains under, and then again I dissolve it in rain, and laugh as I pass in thunder."

"I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone, And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl; The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim, When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl."

"I am gone into the fields to take what this sweet hour yields; ? reflection, you may come to-morrow, sit by the fireside with Sorrow. ? You with the unpaid bill, Despair, ? You, tiresome verse-reciter, Care, I will pay you in the grave, ? Death will listen to your stave."

"I am not much of a hand at love songs, you see I mingle metaphysics with even this, but perhaps in this age of Philosophy that may be excused."

"I arise from dreams of thee in the first sweet sleep of night, when the winds are breathing low, and the stars are shining bright. I arise from dreams of thee, and a spirit in my feet has led me -who knows how? To thy chamber-window, sweet! The wandering airs they faint on the dark, the silent stream -the champak odors fail like sweet thoughts in a dream; the nightingale's complaint, it dies upon her heart, as I must die on thine, o beloved as thou art! Oh lift me from the grass! I die! I faint! I fail! Let thy love in kisses rain on my lips and eyelids pale. My cheek is cold and white, alas! My heart beats loud and fast; oh press it close to thine again, where it will break at last!"

"I can give not what men call love; but wilt thou accept not the worship the heart lifts above and the heavens reject not: 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?"

"I cannot endure the horror, the evil, which comes to self in solitude."

"I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science."

"I don't know where I am, where I will be. Future, present, past, is all a mist; it seems as if I had begun existence anew."

"I could lie down like a tired child, and weep away the life of care which I have borne, and yet must bear,?"

"I have faint hopes: I have some it is true -- just enough to keep body and soul together."

"I know the cause of all human disappointment -- worldly prejudice."

"I have neither curiosity, interest, pain nor pleasure, in anything, good or evil, they can say of me. I feel only a slight disgust, and a sort of wonder that they presume to write my name."

"I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!"

"I know the past and thence I will essay to glean a warning for the future, so that man may profit by his errors, and derive experience from his folly; for, when the power of imparting joy is equal to the will, the human soul requires no other heaven."

"I love Love ? though he has wings, and like light can flee, but above all other things, Spirit, I love thee ? Thou art love and life! Oh come, make once more my heart thy home."

"I love snow, snow, and all the forms of radiant frost."

"I love tranquil solitude, and such society as is quiet, wise, and good; between thee and me what difference? But thou dost possess the things I seek, not love them less."

"I loved a being, an idea of my own mind, which had no real existence. I concreted this abstract of perfection, I annexed this fictitious quality to the idea presented by a name; the being, whom that name signified, was by no means worthy of this. This is the truth: Unless I am determinedly blind -- unless I am resolved causelessly and selfishly to seek destruction, I must see it. Plain! is it not plain? I loved a being; the being, whom I loved, is not what she was; consequently, as love appertains to mind, and not body, she exists no longer. I regret when I find that she never existed, but in my mind; yet does it not border on wilful deception, deliberate, intentional self-deceit, to continue to love the body, when the soul is no more?"

"I never thought before my death to see youth's vision thus made perfect."

"I met Murder on the way ? he had a mask like Castlereagh ? very smooth he looked, yet grim; seven blood-hounds followed him."

"I met a traveler from an antique land who said: ? two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, the hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: "my name is Ozymandias, king of kings: look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" nothing beside remains: round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away."

"I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, and out of the caverns of rain, like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again."

"I weep for Adonais ? he is dead! O, weep for Adonais! though our tears thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!"

"I never was attached to that great sect, whose doctrine is, that each one should select out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, and all the rest, though fair and wise, commend to cold oblivion, though it is in the code of modern morals, and the beaten road which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread, who travel to their home among the dead by the broad highway of the world, and so with one chained friend, ? perhaps a jealous foe, the dreariest and the longest journey go."

"I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder."

"If a person's religious ideas correspond not with your own, love him nevertheless. How different would yours have been, had the chance of birth placed you in Tartary or India!"

"If certain Critics were as clear-sighted as they are malignant, how great would be the benefit to be derived from their writings!"

"If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses? If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them? If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? If he has spoken, why is the universe not convinced? If the knowledge of a God is the most necessary, why is it not the most evident and the clearest?"

"If it be proved that the world is ruled by a Divine Power, no inference necessarily can be drawn from that circumstance in favor of a future state."

"If all the thought which had been expended on the construction of engines of agony and death ? the modes of aggression and defense, the raising of armies, and the acquirement of those arts of tyranny and falsehood without which mixed multitudes could neither be led nor governed ? had been employed to promote the true welfare and extend the real empire of man, how different would have been the present situation of human society! how different the state of knowledge in physical and moral science, upon which the power and happiness of mankind essentially depend!"