Essays in Criticism: Second series, Volume 1

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Macmillan and Company, 1905 - English poetry - 331 pages

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Page 47 - Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang, To step aside is human : One point must still be greatly dark, The moving Why they do it ; And just as lamely can ye mark, How far perhaps they rue it. Who made the heart, 'tis He alone Decidedly can try us, He knows each chord its various tone, Each spring its various bias : Then at the balance let's be mute, We never can adjust it ; What's done we partly may compute, But know not what's resisted.
Page 65 - Memory and her siren daughters ; but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases.
Page 200 - Were with his heart, and that was far away ; He recked not of the life he lost, nor prize ; But where his rude hut by the Danube lay, There were his young barbarians all at play, There was their Dacian mother, — he, their sire, Butchered to make a Roman holiday.
Page 49 - Had we never loved sae kindly, Had we never loved sae blindly, Never met, or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
Page 38 - I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem...
Page 191 - What, in ill thoughts again ? Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither : Ripeness is all : Come on.
Page 19 - Led on the eternal Spring. Not that fair field Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers, Herself a fairer flower by gloomy Dis Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world...
Page 1 - The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.
Page 18 - Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains In cradle of the rude imperious surge, And in the visitation of the winds, Who take the ruffian billows by the top, Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them With deaf 'ning clamour in the slippery clouds, That, with the hurly, death itself awakes?
Page 156 - To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days, On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues...

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