A New Spirit of the Age, Volume 2

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Smith, Elder and Company, 1844 - 8 pages

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Page 25 - Comfort? comfort scorn'd of devils! this is truth the poet sings, That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things. Drug thy memories, lest thou learn it, lest thy heart be put to proof, In the dead unhappy night, and when the rain is on the roof.
Page 2 - On a poet's lips I slept, Dreaming like a love-adept In the sound his breathing kept. Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses, But feeds on the aerial kisses Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses. 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.
Page 289 - We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives Who thinks most — feels the noblest — acts the best.
Page 20 - THERE lies a vale in Ida, lovelier Than all the valleys of Ionian hills. The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen, Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine, And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars The long brook falling thro' the clov'n ravine In cataract after cataract to the sea.
Page 201 - You must begone," said Death, "these walks are mine." Love wept and spread his sheeny vans for flight ; Yet ere he parted said, " This hour is thine : Thou art the shadow of life, and as the tree Stands in the sun and shadows all beneath, So in the light of great eternity Life eminent creates the shade of death ; The shadow passeth when the tree shall fall, But I shall reign for ever over alL
Page 274 - ... stormfully across the astonished Earth ; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage: can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some foot-print of us is stamped in ; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van. But whence ?—O Heaven, whither ? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to...
Page 80 - lieneath this starry arch, Nought resteth or is still ; But all things hold their march As if by one great will. Moves one, move all ; Hark to the foot-fall ! On, on, for ever.
Page 222 - It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.
Page 28 - And bade him cry, with sound of trumpet, all The hard condition, but that she would loose The people ; therefore, as they loved her well, From then till noon no foot should pace the street, No eye look down, she passing, but that all Should keep within, door shut and window barred.
Page 159 - Be sure that God Ne'er dooms to waste the strength he deigns impart ! Ask the gier-eagle why she stoops at once Into the vast and unexplored abyss, What full-grown power informs her from the first, Why she not marvels, strenuously beating The silent boundless regions of the sky!

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