The Liberal Movement in English Literature

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J. Murray, 1885 - 240 pages
 

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Page 37 - Heaven lies about us in our infancy. Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy; But he beholds the light and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy. The youth who daily farther from the East Must travel, still is Nature's priest, And, by the vision splendid, Is on his way attended. At length the man perceives it die away And fade into the light of common day.
Page 104 - Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; His daily teachers had been woods and rills, The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
Page 79 - In the one the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural ; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real.
Page 61 - It was said of Socrates, that he brought philosophy down from heaven, to inhabit among men ; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses.
Page 86 - The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously,...
Page 151 - 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 163 - The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.
Page 13 - Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts ; Into a thousand parts divide one man, And make imaginary puissance ; Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i...
Page 151 - We look before and after, And pine for what is not: Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Page 92 - Suffices me, — her tears, her mirth, Her humblest mirth and tears. " The dragon's wing, the magic ring, I shall not covet for my dower, If I along that lowly way With sympathetic heart may stray, And with a soul of power.

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