Works

O beautiful woman, too well we know
The terrible weight of thy woman's woe,
So great that the world, in its careless way,
Remembered thy beauty for more than a day....

1.

It was too sweet--such dreams do ever fade
When Sorrow shakes the sleeper from his rest--
Life still to me hath been a masquerade,
Woe in Mirth's wildest, gayest mantle drest,...

This strange thing happened to a painter once:
Viterbo boasts the man among her sons
Of note, I seem to think: his ready tool
Picked up its precepts in Cortona's school...

By W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson,
Haymarket Theatre, November 3, 1890.

Spoken by Mr. TREE in the character of Beau Austin.

'To all and singular,' as DRYDEN says,...

Sir, when I flew to seize the bird
In spite of your command,
A louder voice than yours I heard,
And harder to withstand.


You cried'Forbear!'but in my breast
A mightier cried'Proceed!'...

Thou in truth shouldst be one, yet not with the whole shouldst thou be so.
'Tis through the reason thou'rt one, art so with it through the heart....

I

Beautiful-bosomed, O Night, in thy noon
Move with majesty onward! soaring, as lightly
As a singer may soar the notes of an exquisite tune,
The stars and the moon...

Beautiful city, the centre and crater of European confusion,
O you with your passionate shriek for the rights of an equal
humanity,
How often your Re-volution has proven but E-volution...

O your hands - they are strangely fair!
Fair - for the jewels that sparkle there, -
Fair - for the witchery of the spell
That ivory keys alone can tell;
But when their delicate touches rest...

Beautiful lofty things: O'Leary's noble head;
My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd:
"This Land of Saints,' and then as the applause died out,...

O beautiful sky of every hue;

Golden and purple, crimson and blue,
With some sombre lines thrown in between,
And some bright spots of emerald green.
The earth is wed to the sun it seems,...

Women sit, or move to and fro--some old, some young;
The young are beautiful--but the old are more beautiful than the young.

Was never form and never face
So sweet to SEYD as only grace
Which did not slumber like a stone,
But hovered gleaming and was gone.
Beauty chased he everywhere,
In flame, in storm, in clouds of air....

High as a star, yet lowly as a flower,
Unknown she takes her unassuming place
At Earth's proud masquerade--the appointed hour
Strikes, and, behold, the marvel of her face.

Sometimes, slow moving through unlovely days,
The need to look on beauty falls on me
As on the blind the anguished wish to see,
As on the dumb the urge to rage or praise;...

I have seen dawn and sunset on moors and windy hills
Coming in solemn beauty like slow old tunes of Spain:
I have seen the lady April bringing the daffodils,...

Am as lovely as a dream in stone,
And this my heart where each finds death in turn,
Inspires the poet with a love as lone
As clay eternal and as taciturn.

Swan-white of heart, a sphinx no mortal knows,...

The search for beauty is the search for God
Who is All Beauty. He who seeks shall find.
And all along the paths my feet have trod,
I have sought hungrily with heart and mind,...

Beauty's no other but a lovely grace
Of lively colours flowing from the face.

I am so fair that wheresoe'er I wend
Men yearn with strange desire to kiss my face,
Stretch out their hands to touch me as I pass,
And women follow me from place to place.
...