Essays on the Poets: And Other English WritersTicknor, Reed and Fields, 1853 - 296 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
absolutely accident amongst Atheism Atossa beauty Caleb Caleb Williams called character Christian connected Count Julian Dahra darkness deep diction didactic earth effect Eloisa ELOISA TO ABELARD England English Essay evil expression fact faith Falkland false fancied feeling Foster French French Revolution Gebir genius Gilfillan Goldsmith's grandeur Grasmere Hazlitt heart heaven honor human idea idolatry instance intellect interest JOHN KEATS Landor language literary literature Lord Byron Lucretius means ment mind misanthropy mode moral murder nation nature never NOTE novels object OLIVER GOLDSMITH once Oxford party passion PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY philosophic poem poet poetry political Pope Pope's principle reader reason regards Roman satiric seems sense Shelley Shelley's social society sorrow Southey speak spirit story suffered supposed sympathy things thou thought tion true truth utter WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR whilst whole WILLIAM GODWIN WILLIAM HAZLITT word Wordsworth writer wrong
Popular passages
Page 34 - The cock is crowing, The stream is flowing, The small birds twitter, The lake doth glitter, The green field sleeps in the sun ; The oldest and youngest Are at work with the strongest ; The cattle are grazing, Their heads never raising ; There are forty feeding like one...
Page 12 - The pleasure-house is dust : behind, before, This is no common waste, no common gloom ; But Nature, in due course of time, once more Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom. "She leaves these objects to a slow decay, That what we are, and have been, may be known ; But at the coming of the milder day These monuments shall all be overgrown.
Page 62 - The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.
Page 180 - For modes of faith, let graceless zealots fight; His can't be wrong whose life is in the right; In faith and hope the world will disagree.
Page 41 - From an eternity of idleness I, God, awoke ; in seven days' toil made earth From nothing ; rested, and created man : I placed him in a paradise, and there Planted the tree of evil, so that he Might eat and perish, and my soul procure Wherewith to sate its malice, and to turn, Even like a heartless conqueror of the earth, All misery to my fame.
Page 53 - I do remember well the hour which burst My spirit's sleep: a fresh May-dawn it was, When I walked forth upon the glittering grass, And wept, I knew not why; until there rose From the near schoolroom, voices, that, alas! Were but one echo from a world of woes — The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.
Page 42 - O almighty one, I tremble and obey ! " O Spirit ! centuries have set their seal On this heart of many wounds, and loaded brain, Since the Incarnate came : humbly he came, Veiling his horrible Godhead in the shape Of man, scorned by the world, his name unheard, Save by the rabble of his native town, Even as a parish demagogue.
Page 171 - NOTHING so true as what you once let fall, " Most women have no characters at all." Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear, And best distinguish'd by black, brown, or fair. How many pictures of one nymph we view...
Page 53 - I will be wise, And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies Such power, for I grow weary to behold The selfish and the strong still tyrannize Without reproach or check.
Page 152 - It does not mean a justice that differs by its object from the ordinary justice of human jurisprudence ; for then it must be confessedly a very bad kind of justice ; but it means a justice that differs from common forensic justice by the degree in which it attains its object, a justice that is more omnipotent over its own ends, as dealing — not with the refractory elements of earthly life, but with the elements of its own creation, and with materials flexible to its own purest preconceptions.