Three Studies in Shelley, and an Essay on Nature in Wordsworth and Meredith

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Oxford University Press, H. Milford, 1921 - 189 pages
 

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Page 26 - That light whose smile kindles the universe, That beauty in which all things work and move, That benediction which the eclipsing curse Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love Which, through the web of being blindly wove By man and beast and earth and air and sea, Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me, Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.
Page 51 - To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates...
Page 158 - Myself will to my darling be Both law and impulse: and with me The girl, in rock and plain In earth and heaven, in glade and bower Shall feel an overseeing power To kindle or restrain. 'She shall be sportive as the fawn That wild with glee across the lawn Or up the mountain springs; And hers shall be the breathing balm, And hers the silence and the calm* Of mute insensate things.
Page 53 - Nor mix with Laian rage the joy Which dawns upon the free, Although a subtler Sphinx renew Riddles of death Thebes never knew. Another Athens shall arise, And to remoter time Bequeath, like sunset to the skies, The splendour of its prime ; And leave, if nought so bright may live, All earth can take or heaven can give.
Page 181 - Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain-winds be free To blow against thee: and, in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh!
Page 52 - The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn: Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
Page 141 - Yet now despair itself is mild, Even as the winds and waters are ; I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear...
Page 76 - Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep, — that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live. — I look on high; Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled The veil of life and death?
Page 17 - A power from the unknown God, A Promethean conqueror came ; Like a triumphal path he trod The thorns of death and shame. A mortal shape to him Was like the vapour dim Which the orient planet animates with light...
Page 158 - Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star. Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried, Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar. Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting: So were it with me if forgetting could be willed. Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling wellspring Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.

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