Quotes to inspire and reflect

The music in my heart I bore Long after it was heard no more.

Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart; Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free, So didst thou travel on life’s common way, In cheerful godliness.

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held.

Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters.

Once did she hold the gorgeous east in fee: And was the safeguard of the west.

Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year; And worship’st at the Temple’s inner shrine, God being with thee when we know it not.

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a nun Breathless with adoration.

Plain living and high thinking are no more: The homely beauty of the good old cause Is gone; our peace, our fearful innocence, And pure religion breathing household laws.

Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty.

Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will! Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!

And mighty poets in their misery dead.

Choice word and measured phrase, above the reach Of ordinary men.

Sweet childish days, that were as long As twenty days are now.

I thought of Chatterton, 4 the marvelous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride; Of him 5 who walked in glory and in joy Following his plow, along the mountainside: By our own spirits are we deified: We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

My heart leaps up when I behold So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, The child is father of the man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. 3

I traveled among unknown men, In lands beyond the sea; Nor, England! did I know till then What love I bore to thee.

Something between a hindrance and a help.

The harvest of a quiet eye.

A reasoning, self-sufficing thing, An intellectual All-in-all!

One that would peep and botanize Upon his mother’s grave?

She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love: 2 A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! —Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me!

A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide Into a lover’s head! “O mercy!” to myself I cried, “If Lucy should be dead!”

Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak A lasting inspiration, sanctified By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved, Others will love, and we will teach them how; Instruct them how the mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!

One great society alone on earth: The noble Living and the noble Dead.

But Europe at that time was thrilled with joy, France standing on the top of golden hours, And human nature seeming born again.

Of Newton with his prism and silent face, The marble index of a mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.

Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows Like harmony in music; there is a dark Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, makes them cling together In one society.

Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion like a living thing, Strode after me.

Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her.

Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colors and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye.

While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.

In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened.

His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.

Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.

One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.

Nor less I deem that there are Powers Which of themselves our minds impress; That we can feed this mind of ours In a wise passiveness.

Have I not reason to lament What man has made of man?

_______ A simple child, 1 That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death?

And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.

Ah, where will I find Flowers, come winter, And where the sunshine And shade of the earth? Walls stand cold And speechless, in the wind The weathervanes creak. 1

Near and Hard to grasp, the god. Yet where danger lies, Grows that which saves. 1

In its eye the far-off hills are mirrored— dragonfly! 1

The world of dew Is the world of dew, And yet… And yet… 1

In durance vile here must I wake and weep, And all my frowsy couch in sorrow steep.