Emotions and Feelings

For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been!” 2

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books.

A Lady with a Lamp [Florence Nightingale] shall stand In the great history of the land, A noble type of good, Heroic womanhood.

If I am not worth the wooing, I surely am not worth the winning.

Sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

Into each life some rain must fall, Some days must be dark and dreary.

Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.

Because God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, Ere the sorrow comes with years?

I tell you hopeless grief is passionless.

Knowledge by suffering entereth, And life is perfected by death.

Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.

Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt, as if God wrote the bill.

Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days, Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes, And marching single in an endless file, Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.

So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can.

God said, I am tired of kings, I suffer them no more; Up to my ear the morning brings The outrage of the poor.

Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom; Lead thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home; Lead thou me on! Keep thou my feet: I do not ask to see The distant scene; one step enough for me.

Glimmering stars of the Great Bear, I never thought I’d be back to see you Shining down on my father’s garden, Nor talk to you ever again from the windows Of this house where I spent my childhood And saw the last of my happiness vanish.

Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps, Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvests reaps.

Child, you are like a flower, So sweet and pure and fair. I look at you, and sadness Touches me with a prayer.

I will not mourn, although my heart is torn, Oh, love forever lost! I will not mourn.

I cannot tell why this imagined Despair has fallen upon me; The ghost of an ancient legend That will not let me be.

I cannot tell why this imagined Despair has fallen upon me; The ghost of an ancient legend That will not let me be.