Marcus Aurelius. But the stifling denOf common life, where, crowded up pell-mell,Our freedom for a little bread we sell,And drudge under some foolish master’s kenWho rates us if we peer outside our pen–Match’d with a palace, is not this a hell?Even in a palace! On his truth sincere,Who spoke these words, no shadow ever came;And…
God put a heap of letters in his hand,And bade him make with them what word he could.And man has turn’d them many times; made Greece,Rome, England, France;–yes, nor in vain essay’dWay after way, changes that never cease!The letters have combined, something was made.But ah! an inextinguishable senseHaunts him that he has not made what…
I bade it keep the world away,And grow a home for only thee;Nor fear’d but thy love likewise grew,Like mine, each day, more tried, more true.The fault was grave! I might have known,What far too soon, alas! I learn’d–The heart can bind itself alone,And faith may oft be unreturn’d.Self-sway’d our feelings ebb and swell–Thou lov’st…
Each on his own strict line we move,And some find death ere they find love;So far apart their lives are thrownFrom the twin soul which halves their own.And sometimes, by harder fate,The lovers meet, but meet too late.– Thy heart is mine! – True, true! ah, true!– Then, love, thy hand! – Ah no! adieu!
As of old, in the fields of heaven,Your distant, melancholy lines!Have you, too, survived yourselves?Are you, too, what I fear to become?You, too, once lived;You too moved joyfullyAmong august companions,In an older world, peopled by Gods,In a mightier order,The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent Sons of Heaven.But now, ye kindleYour lonely, cold-shining lights,Unwilling lingerersIn the heavenly wilderness,For…
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,We mortal millions live alone.The islands feel the enclasping flow,And then their endless bounds they know.But when the moon their hollows lights,And they are swept by balms of spring,And in their glens, on starry nights,The nightingales divinely sing;And lovely notes, from shore to shore,Across the sounds and channels pour–Oh! then a…
And lonely as a truant childIn a waste wood, a single boat:No mast, no sails are set thereon;It moves, but never moveth on:And welters like a human thingAmid the wild waves weltering.Behind, a buried vale doth sleep,Far down the torrent cleaves its way:In front the dumb rock rises steep,A fretted wall of blue and grey;Of…
Fired their ringing shot and pass’d,Hotly charged- and sank at last.Charge once more, then, and be dumb!Let the victors, when they come,When the forts of folly fall,Find thy body by the wall!
Hark, from that moonlit cedar what a burst!What triumph! hark!–what pain!O wanderer from a Grecian shore,Still, after many years, in distant lands,Still nourishing in thy bewilder’d brainThat wild, unquench’d, deep-sunken, old-world pain–Say, will it never heal?And can this fragrant lawnWith its cool trees, and night,And the sweet, tranquil Thames,And moonshine, and the dew,To thy rack’d…
Could ever yet dare tell him fearlessly:‘I have kept uninfringed my nature’s law ;The inly-written chart thou gavest me,To guide me, I have steer’d by to the end’?Ah! let us make no claim,On life’s incognisable sea,To too exact a steering of our way;Let us not fret and fear to miss our aim,If some fair coast…
