Notes from books, in four essays

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Page 86 - tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 130 The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings.
Page xv - The primogenitive and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, But by degree, stand in authentic place ? Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark, what discord follows ! each thing meets In mere oppugnancy...
Page 34 - The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colors and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye.
Page 33 - To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened...
Page 35 - All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear, — ;both what they half create, And what perceive...
Page 165 - Yet nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean: so, o'er that art, Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race: this is an art Which does mend nature, — change it rather; but The art itself is nature.
Page 167 - Save base authority from others' books. • These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights, That give a name to every fixed star, Have no more profit of their shining nights, Than those that walk, and wot not what they are.
Page 99 - THREE years she grew in sun and shower, Then Nature said, ' A lovelier flower On earth was never sown; This Child I to myself will take; She shall be mine, and I will make A Lady of my own.
Page xvi - Strength should be lord of imbecility, And the rude son should strike his father dead; Force should be right, or rather, right and wrong, Between whose endless jar justice resides, Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Page 76 - SCORN not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours ; with this key Shakspeare unlocked his heart; the melody Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound; A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound; With it Camoens soothed an exile's grief; The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp, It...

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