If Pegasus will let thee only ride him, Spurning my clumsy efforts to o'erstride him, Some fresh expedient the Muse will try, And walk on stilts, although she cannot fly.
The poet in his lone yet genial hour Gives to his eyes a magnifying power: Or rather he emancipates his eyes From the black shapeless accidents of size - In unctuous cones of kindling coal,...
Now as Heaven is my Lot, they're the Pests of the Nation! Wherever they can come With clankum and blankum 'Tis all Botheration, & Hell & Damnation, With fun, jeering Conjuring Sky-staring,...
'Tis true, Idoloclastes Satyrane! (So call him, for so mingling blame with praise, And smiles with anxious looks, his earliest friends, Masking his birth-name, wont to character...
With many a pause and oft reverted eye I climb the Coomb's ascent: sweet songsters near Warble in shade their wild-wood melody: Far off the unvarying Cuckoo soothes my ear....
In K'hln, a town of monks and bones, And pavements fang'd with murderous stones And rags, and hags, and hideous wenches; I counted two and seventy stenches, All well defined, and several stinks!...
Since all, that beat about in Nature's range, Or veer or vanish; why should'st thou remain The only constant in a world of change, O yearning THOUGHT! that liv'st but in the brain?...
Where true Love burns Desire is Love's pure flame; It is the reflex of our earthly frame, That takes its meaning from the nobler part, And but translates the language of the heart.
I have experienc'd The worst, the World can wreak on me, the worst That can make Life indifferent, yet disturb With whisper'd Discontents the dying prayer, I have beheld the whole of all, wherein...
Stop, Christian passer-by: Stop, child of God, And read, with gentle breast. Beneath this sod A poet lies, or that which once seem'd he O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C....
A green and silent spot, amid the hills, A small and silent dell! O'er stiller place No singing sky-lark ever poised himself. The hills are heathy, save that swelling slope,...
... O Liberty! with profitless endeavour Have I pursued thee, many a weary hour; But thou nor swell'st the victor's strain, nor ever Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power....
The Frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry Came loud, and hark, again! loud as before. The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, Have left me to that solitude, which suits...
If dead, we cease to be; if total gloom Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom, Whose sound and motion not alone declare,...