Others

A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune.

A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune.

O happy living things! no tongue Their beauty might declare: A spring of love gushed from my heart, And I blessed them unaware.

Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was white as leprosy, The nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man’s blood with cold.

As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.

The bride hath paced into the hall, Red as a rose is she.

Be but organic harps diversely fram’d, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of All?

O the one life within us and abroad, Which meets all motion and becomes its soul, A light in sound, a sound-like power in light, Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere— Methinks, it should have been impossible Not to love all things in a world so filled.

Oh, Brignal banks are wild and fair, And Greta woods are green, And you may gather garlands there Would grace a summer queen.

I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as ’twas said to me.

Scorn not the sonnet; Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honors; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.

Scorn not the sonnet; Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honors; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.

Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know, Are a substantial world, both pure and good: Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, Our pastime and our happiness will grow.

The light that never was, on sea or land, The consecration, and the poet’s dream.

A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company.

A perfect woman, nobly planned, To warn, to comfort, and command. And yet a Spirit still, and bright With something of angelic light.

She was a phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight; A lovely apparition, sent To be a moment’s ornament.

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, But trailing clouds of glory do we come Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close

The Rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the Rose.

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.

And mighty poets in their misery dead.

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.