If God compel thee to this destiny, To die alone, with none beside thy bed To ruffle round with sobs thy last word said And mark with tears the pulses ebb from thee,...
One eve it happened, when I sat alone, Alone, upon the terrace of my tower, A book upon my knees to counterfeit The reading that I never read at all, While Marian, in the garden down below,...
Aurora Leigh, be humble. Shall I hope To speak my poems in mysterious tune With man and nature? with the lava-lymph That trickles from successive galaxies Still drop by drop adown the finger of God...
They met still sooner. 'Twas a year from thence That Lucy Gresham, the sick sempstress girl, Who sewed by Marian's chair so still and quick, And leant her head upon its back to cough...
Of writing many books there is no end; And I who have written much in prose and verse For others' uses, will write now for mine, Will write my story for my better self,...
"The woman's motive? shall we daub ourselves With finding roots for nettles? 'tis soft clay And easily explored. She had the means, The moneys, by the lady's liberal grace,...
The English have a scornful insular way Of calling the French light. The levity Is in the judgment only, which yet stands, For say a foolish thing but oft enough (And here's the secret of a hundred creeds,...
"To-day thou girdest up thy loins thyself And goest where thou wouldest: presently Others shall gird thee," said the Lord, "to go Where thou wouldst not." He spoke to Peter thus,...
Times followed one another. Came a morn I stood upon the brink of twenty years, And looked before and after, as I stood Woman and artist, either incomplete, Both credulous of completion. There I held...
The cypress stood up like a church That night we felt our love would hold, And saintly moonlight seemed to search And wash the whole world clean as gold; The olives crystallized the vales'...
I think we are too ready with complaint In this fair world of God's. Had we no hope Indeed beyond the zenith and the slope Of yon gray blank of sky, we might grow faint To muse upon eternity's constraint...
Wordsworth upon Helvellyn! Let the cloud Ebb audibly along the mountain-wind, Then break against the rock, and show behind The lowland valleys floating up to crowd...
'O dreary life,' we cry, 'O dreary life!' And still the generations of the birds Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds Serenely live while we are keeping strife...
What's the best thing in the world? June-rose, by May-dew impearled; Sweet south-wind, that means no rain; Truth, not cruel to a friend; Pleasure, not in haste to end; Beauty, not self-decked and curled...
Said a people to a poet "Go out from among us straightway! While we are thinking earthly things, thou singest of divine. There's a little fair brown nightingale, who, sitting in the gateways...