Emotions and Feelings

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

That thus enchains us to permitted ill— We might be otherwise—we might be all We dream of happy, high majestical. Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek, But in our mind?

That thus enchains us to permitted ill— We might be otherwise—we might be all We dream of happy, high majestical. Where is the love, beauty and truth we seek, But in our mind?

And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

To know nor faith, nor love nor law; to be Omnipotent but friendless is to reign.

The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden, That apparition, sole of men, he saw.

I could lie down like a tired child, And weep away the life of care Which I have borne and yet must bear, Till death like sleep might steal on me.

Some say that gleams of a remoter world Visit the soul in sleep—that death is slumber, And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber Of those who wake and live.

My days are in the yellow leaf; The flowers and fruits of love are gone; The worm, the canker, and the grief Are mine alone!

The “good old times”—all times when old are good— Are gone.

He is all-powerful, must all-good, too, follow? I judge but by the fruits—and they are bitter— Which I must feed on for a fault not mine.

Oh, talk not to me of a name great in story; The days of our youth are the days of our glory; And the myrtle and ivy of sweet two-and-twenty Are worth all your laurels, though ever so plenty.

Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe, Sadder than owl songs or the midnight blast, Is that portentous phrase, “I told you so.”

That happiness for man—the hungry sinner!— Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.

Society is now one polish’d horde, Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored.

Not so Leonidas and Washington, Whose every battlefield is holy ground, Which breathes of nations saved, not worlds undone.

And if I laugh at any mortal thing, ’Tis that I may not weep.

Earth! render back from out thy breast A remnant of our Spartan dead! Of the three hundred grant but three, To make a new Thermopylae.

The mountains look on Marathon, And Marathon looks on the sea; And musing there an hour alone, I dreamed that Greece might still be free.

In her first passion woman loves her lover, In all the others, all she loves is love.

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; The best of life is but intoxication.