Book ii
._
Dance and Provençal song and sunburnt mirth! Oh for a beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene! With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stainèd mouth.
_Ode to a Nightingale._
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that ofttimes hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
_Ode to a Nightingale._
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time.
_Ode on a Grecian Urn._
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on,-- Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.
_Ode on a Grecian Urn._
Thou, silent form, doth tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
_Ode on a Grecian Urn._
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
_Ode on a Grecian Urn._
In a drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy tree, Thy branches ne'er remember Their green felicity.
_Stanzas._
Hear ye not the hum Of mighty workings?
_Addressed to Haydon. Sonnet x._
Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne, Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise, Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
_On first looking into Chapman's Homer._
E'en like the passage of an angel's tear That falls through the clear ether silently.
_To One who has been long in City pent._
The poetry of earth is never dead.
_On the Grasshopper and Cricket._
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.[577-1]
FOOTNOTES:
[577-1] See Chapman, page 37.
Among the many things he has requested of me to-night, this is the principal,--that on his gravestone shall be this inscription.--RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES: _Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. Letter to Severn, vol. ii. p. 91._
THOMAS NOON TALFOURD. 1795-1854.
So his life has flowed From its mysterious urn a sacred stream, In whose calm depth the beautiful and pure Alone are mirrored; which, though shapes of ill May hover round its surface, glides in light, And takes no shadow from them.
_Ion. Act i. Sc. 1._
'T is a little thing To give a cup of water; yet its draught Of cool refreshment, drained by fevered lips, May give a shock of pleasure to the frame More exquisite than when nectarean juice Renews the life of joy in happiest hours.
_Ion. Act i. Sc. 2._
THOMAS CARLYLE. 1795-1881.
Except by name, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter is little known out of Germany. The only thing connected with him, we think, that has reached this country is his saying,--imported by Madame de Staël, and thankfully pocketed by most newspaper critics,--"Providence has given to the French the empire of the land; to the English that of the sea; to the Germans that of--the air!"
_Richter. Edinburgh Review, 1827._
Literary men are . . . a perpetual priesthood.
_State of German Literature. Edinburgh Review, 1827._
Clever men are good, but they are not the best.
_Goethe. Edinburgh Review, 1828._
We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
_Goethe. Edinburgh Review, 1828._
How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?
_Burns. Edinburgh Review, 1828._
A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.
_Burns. Edinburgh Review, 1828._
His religion at best is an anxious wish,--like that of Rabelais, a great Perhaps.
_Burns. Edinburgh Review, 1828._
We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."[578-1]
_Voltaire. Foreign Review, 1829._
We must repeat the often repeated saying, that it is unworthy a religious man to view an irreligious one either with alarm or aversion, or with any other feeling than regret and hope and brotherly commiseration.
_Voltaire. Foreign Review, 1829._
There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.
_Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838._
Silence is deep as Eternity, speech is shallow as Time.
_Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838._
To the very last, he [Napoleon] had a kind of idea; that, namely, of _la carrière ouverte aux talents_,--the tools to him that can handle them.[579-1]
_Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838._
Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one!
_Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838._
The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others.
_Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838._
Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.
_Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838._
It can be said of him, when he departed he took a Man's life with him. No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of Time.
_Sir Walter Scott. London and Westminster Review, 1838._
The eye of the intellect "sees in all objects what it brought with it the means of seeing."
_Varnhagen Von Ense's Memoirs. London and Westminster Review, 1838._
Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books.[579-2]
_Life of Frederick the Great.