Quotes to inspire and reflect

O Cuckoo! Shall I call thee bird,

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

True to the kindred points of heaven and home!

Two Voices are there; one is of the sea,

One impulse from a vernal wood

Our meddling intellect

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

What, you are stepping westward?

She seemed a thing that could not feel

Behold her, single in the field,

A perfect woman; nobly planned,

And now I see with eye serene

She lived unknown, and few could know

She was a phantom of delight.

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

A violet by a mossy stone

The good old rule

Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,

Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide;

We poets in our youth begin in gladness;

I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,

All things have second birth;

In common things that round us lie

The statue stood

Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee,

A reasoning, self-sufficing thing,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Plain living and high thinking are no more:

And by the vision splendid

But for those obstinate questionings

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

A timely utterance gave that thought relief,

The rainbow comes and goes,

The Child is father of the Man.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky:

And much it grieved my heart to think

A sense sublime

The still, sad music of humanity,

On that best portion of a good man’s life,

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue

For oft, when on my couch I lie

All shod with steel

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.

The light that never was, on sea or land,

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,