Emotions and Feelings

Surgeons must be very careful When they take the knife! Underneath their fine incisions Stirs the Culprit— Life!

Behold the life at ease; it drifts, The sharpened life commands its course.

With patient inattention hear him prate.

For singing till his heaven fills, ’Tis love of earth that he instills, And ever winging up and up, Our valley is his golden cup, And he the wine which over flows To lift us with him as he goes.

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life!

Cynicism is intellectual dandyism.

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.

Let the long contention cease! Geese are swans, and swans are geese.

Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.

Yes, thou art gone! and round me too the night In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade.

Are ye too changed, ye hills? See, ’tis no foot of unfamiliar men Tonight from Oxford up your pathway strays! Here came I often, often, in old days— Thyrsis [Arthur Hugh Clough] and I; we still had Thyrsis then.

Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too!

Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade.

Who most has suffered, takes dejectedly His seat upon the intellectual throne.

Oh, born in days when wits were fresh and clear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modern life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o’ertaxed, its palsied hearts, was rife.

But often in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life.

Yes, in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone .

Is it so small a thing To have enjoyed the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done; To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes?

Thou hast no right to bliss.

Calm Soul of all things! make it mine To feel, amid the city’s jar, That there abides a peace of thine, Man did not make, and can not mar.

What do I care that you are good? Be beautiful! and be sad! 11

I am the wound and the knife! I am the blow and the cheek! I am the limbs and the wheel— The victim and the executioner! 6

I am the wound and the knife! I am the blow and the cheek! I am the limbs and the wheel— The victim and the executioner! 6

There, there is nothing else but grace and measure, Richness, quietness and pleasure. 4