Works

Why do ye weep, sweet babes? can tears
Speak grief in you,
Who were but born
just as the modest morn
Teem'd her refreshing dew?
Alas, you have not known that shower
That mars a flower,...

Poet, whose words are like the tight-packed seed
Sealed in the capsule of a silver flower,
Still at your art we wonder as we read,
The art dynamic charging each word with power.
...

The Spirit of Wine
Sang in my glass, and I listened
With love to his odorous music,
His flushed and magnificent song.

- 'I am health, I am heart, I am life!
For I give for the asking...

"I saw a sky of stars that rolled in grime.
All glory twinkled through some sweat of fight,
From each tall chimney of the roaring time
That shot his fire far up the sooty night...

Southey! high placed on the contested throne
Of modern verse, a Muse, herself unknown,
Sues that her tears may consecrate the strains
Pour'd o'er the urn enrich'd with WHITE'S Remains!...

The wisest soul, by anguish torn,
Will soon unlearn the lore it knew;
And when the shrining casket's worn,
The gem within will tarnish too.

But love's an essence of the soul,...

Olor Iscanus queries: 'Why should we
Vex at the land's ridiculous miserie?'
So on his Usk banks, in the blood-red dawn
Of England's civil strife, did careless Vaughan...

Written at the Cottage of T. LEWIS, Esq. Woodbury Downs.


In the retirement of this lovely spot,
Sacred to friendship, industry, and worth,
To boundless hospitality and mirth,...

Your head, your gesture, your air,
are lovely, like a lovely landscape:
laughter's alive, in your face,
a fresh breeze in a clear atmosphere.

The dour passer-by you brush past there,...

There has been many a grander deed since man had life to give,
And thousands have gone to certain death, eyes open, that men might live;...

Let us, though late, at last, my Silvia, wed;
And loving lie in one devoted bed.
Thy watch may stand, my minutes fly post haste;
No sound calls back the year that once is past....

Far from our home by Grasmere's quiet Lake,
From the Vale's peace which all her fields partake,
Here on the bleakest point of Cumbria's shore
We sojourn stunned by Ocean's ceaseless roar;...

How blest art thou, canst love the countrey, Wroth,
Whether by choyce, or fate, or both!
And, though so neere the Citie, and the Court,
Art tane with neithers vice, nor sport:...

I will not striue m' inuention to inforce,
With needlesse words your eyes to entertaine,
T' obserue the formall ordinarie course
That euerie one so vulgarly doth faine:...

Since last I saw that countenance so mild,
Slow-stealing age, and a faint line of care,
Had gently touched, methought, some features there;
Yet looked the man as placid as a child,...

My dear Sir William Harcourt, -
(I have not time to get up your other distinguished names,
So that you must please excuse the plain Sir William),
My dear Sir William, do you ever survey the Liberal party,...

While I wrought out these fitful Danaan rhymes,
My heart would brim with dreams about the times
When we bent down above the fading coals
And talked of the dark folk who live in souls...

"It is the future generation that presses into being by means of
these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours."
Schopenhauer

"The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open....

As, when a lofty pile is raised,
We never hear the workmen praised,
Who bring the lime, or place the stones.
But all admire Inigo Jones:
So, if this pile of scatter'd rhymes...

Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce
And dost not know the Garment from the Man
Every Harlot was a Virgin once
Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan

Tho thou art Worship'd by the Names Divine...