"Wordsworth has gone from us — and ye, Ah, may ye feel his voice as we! He too upon a wintry clime Had fallen — on this iron time Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears."

"Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel — below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed."

"At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is."

"The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty. Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly."

"The free-thinking of one age is the common sense of the next."

"I will not say that thou wast true, Yet let me say that thou wast fair! And they that lovely face who view, They should not ask if truth be there."

"Style...is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it."

"Choose equality."

"The Celts certainly have it in a wonderful measure."

"Was Christ a man like us? — Ah! let us try If we then, too, can be such men as he!"

"The East bowed low before the blast, In patient deep disdain; She let the legions thunder past, And plunged in thought again."

"Hath man no second life? — Pitch this one high!"

"Nor bring, to see me cease to live, Some doctor full of phrase and fame, To shake his sapient head and give The ill he cannot cure a name."

"It is — last stage of all — When we are frozen up within, and quite The phantom of ourselves, To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost Which blamed the living man."

"Ere the parting hour go by, Quick, thy tablets, Memory!"

"Inequality has the natural and necessary effect, under the present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class."

"Cruel, but composed and bland, Dumb, inscrutable and grand, So Tiberius might have sat, Had Tiberius been a cat."

"This truth — to prove, and make thine own: ‘Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.’"

"Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm, Endless extinction of unhappy hates."

"But each day brings its petty dust Our soon-chok’d souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will."

"With women the heart argues, not the mind."

"How fair a lot to fill Is left to each man still."

"Their ineffectual feuds and feeble hates, Shadows of hates, but they distress them still."

"Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself."

"Come to me in my dreams, and then By day I shall be well again! For so the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day."

"A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again."

"A man becomes aware of his life's flow... And there arrives a lull in the hot race."

"The same heart beats in every human breast."

"And then he thinks he knows The Hills where his life rose, And the Sea where it goes."

"Still bent to make some port he knows not where, Still standing for some false, impossible shore."

"It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think."

"Sanity — that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power."

"For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry."

"What actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent and the same also."

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

"Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?"

"Her cabin’d, ample Spirit, It flutter’d and fail’d for breath. To-night it doth inherit The vasty Hall of Death."

"This heart, I know, To be long lov’d was never fram’d; For something in its depths doth glow Too strange, too restless, too untam’d."

"I too have long'd for trenchant force, And will like a dividing spear; Have praised the keen, unscrupulous course Which knows no doubt, which feels no fear."

"Hark! ah, the nightingale — The tawny-throated! Hark, from that moonlit cedar what a burst! What triumph! hark! — what pain!"

"To thee only God granted A heart ever new: To all always open; To all always true."

"Ah! two desires toss about The poet's feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude."

"We, in some unknown Power's employ, Move on a rigorous line; Can neither, when we will, enjoy, Nor, when we will, resign."

"What shelter to grow ripe is ours? What leisure to grow wise?"

"Eyes too expressive to be blue, Too lovely to be grey."

"Only — but this is rare — When a belovèd hand is laid in ours, When, jaded with the rush and glare Of the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear, When our world-deafen'd ear Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd— A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know."

"And sigh that only one thing has been lent To youth and age in common — discontent."

"How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves! Again — thou hearest? Eternal passion! Eternal pain!"

"Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he Who finds himself, loses his misery."