Romantic Poets

"There are two reasons for drinking: one is, when you are thirsty, to cure it; the other, when you are not thirsty, to prevent it. The first is obvious, mechanical, and plebeian; the second is most refined, abstract, prospicient, and canonical."

"The waste of plenty is the resource of scarcity."

"When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him."

"The mountain sheep are sweeter But the valley sheep are fatter; We therefore deemed it meeter To carry off the latter. We made an expedition; We met a host, and quelled it; We forced a strong position, And killed the men who held it...As we drove our prize at leisure, The king marched forth to catch us: His rage surpassed all measure, But his people could not match us. He fled to his hall-pillars; And, ere our force we led off, Some sacked his house and cellars, While others cut his head off."

"Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent."

"My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is, me judice [in my opinion], no book - it is a plaything."

"O vanity! you are the lever by means of which Archimedes wished to lift the earth!"

"Many a calm river begins as a turbulent waterfall, yet none hurtles and foams all the way to the sea."

"I am like a mariner born and bred on board a buccaneer brig whose soul has become so inured to storm and strife that if cast ashore he would weary and languish no matter how alluring the shady groves and how bright the gentle sun."

"I would make any sacrifice but this; twenty times I can stake my life, even my honour, but my freedom I shall never sell. Why do I prize it so much? … What am I aiming at? Nothing, absolutely nothing."

"Happy people are ignoramuses and glory is nothing else but success, and to achieve it one only has to be cunning."

"The public of this country is so youthful, not to say simple-minded, that it cannot understand the meaning of a fable unless the moral is set forth at the end. Unable to see a joke, insensible to irony, it has, in a word, been badly brought up. It has not yet learned that in a decent book, as in decent society, open invective can have no place; that our present-day civilisation has invented a keener weapon, none the less deadly for being almost invisible, which, under the cloak of flattery, strikes with sure and irresistible effect."

"I was involuntarily struck by the aptitude which the Russian displays for accommodating himself to the customs of the people in whose midst he happens to be living. I know not whether this mental quality is deserving of censure or commendation, but it proves the incredible pliancy of his mind and the presence of that clear common sense which pardons evil wherever it sees that evil is inevitable or impossible of annihilation."

"A childish feeling, I admit, but, when we retire from the conventions of society and draw close to nature, we involuntarily become children: each attribute acquired by experience falls away from the soul, which becomes anew such as it was once and will surely be again."

"I knew practically the whole of Lermontov by heart, and such writers as Chernyshevsky, Lev Tolstoi and Uspensky had, somehow, become part of my life."

"No, it is not you I love so ardently, The glitter of your beauty is not for me: I love in you my past suffering And my perished youth."

"In people's eyes I read Pages of malice and sin."

"Farewell, unwashed Russia, Land of slaves, land of masters, And you, blue uniforms, And you, people, devoted to them. Perhaps beyond the wall of the Caucasus, I will hide from your pashas, From their all-seeing eye, From their all-hearing ears."

"To the earth I gave the earthly tribute Of love, hopes, good and evil; I am ready to begin another life, I am silent and wait: the time has come; I shall leave no brother in this world, And dark and cold embrace My tired soul; Like a premature fruit, deprived of sap, It withered in the storms of fate Under the burning sun of existence."

"And I, as I lived, in an alien land Will die a slave and an orphan."

"The surrounding forest, as though in a mist, Was blue in the powder of smoke. But there, far off, in a disordered ridge, Which was yet eternally proud and calm, Stretched the mountains — and Kazbek Gleamed with its sharp peak. And with secret, heartfelt sorrow I thought: 'Pitiable man. What does he want! The sky is clear, Beneath it there is much room for all, But constantly and vainly He alone wages war — why?'"

"For what did the creator prepare me, Why did he so terribly contradict The hopes of my youth?..."

"I do not love you; the former dream Of passions and torments has passed by; But your image in my soul Is still alive, although it is powerless; Although I abandon myself to other dreams, I still cannot forget it; So an abandoned temple is still a temple, A dethroned idol — still a god!"

"What good are the passions? For sooner or later their sweet sickness ends when reason speaks up; And life, if surveyed with cold-blooded regard is stupid and empty — a joke."

"I was born, so that the whole world could be a spectator Of my triumph or my doom..."

"What is this eternity to me without you? What is the infinity of my domains? Empty ringing words, A spacious temple — without a divinity!"

"And everything that he saw before him He despised or hated."

"I want to reconcile myself with heaven, I want to love, I want to pray, I want to believe in good."

"...man, this ruler over general evil, With a perfidious heart, with a lying tongue..."

"Women! Women! Who can understand them? Their smiles contradict their glances, their words promise and allure, but the tone of their voice repels."

"You men do not understand the delights of a glance, of a pressure of the hand... but as for me, I swear to you that, when I listen to your voice, I feel such a deep, strange bliss that the most passionate kisses could not take its place."

"Alone, as before, in the universe Without hope and without love!.."

"My whole past life I live again in memory, and, involuntarily, I ask myself: 'why have I lived - for what purpose was I born?'... A purpose there must have been, and, surely, mine was an exalted destiny, because I feel that within my soul are powers immeasurable... But I was not able to discover that destiny, I allowed myself to be carried away by the allurements of passions, inane and ignoble. From their crucible I issued hard and cold as iron, but gone for ever was the glow of noble aspirations - the fairest flower of life. And, from that time forth, how often have I not played the part of an axe in the hands of fate! Like an implement of punishment, I have fallen upon the head of doomed victims, often without malice, always without pity... To none has my love brought happiness, because I have never sacrificed anything for the sake of those I have loved: for myself alone I have loved - for my own pleasure. I have only satisfied the strange craving of my heart, greedily draining their feelings, their tenderness, their joys, their sufferings - and I have never been able to sate myself. I am like one who, spent with hunger, falls asleep in exhaustion and sees before him sumptuous viands and sparkling wines; he devours with rapture the aerial gifts of the imagination, and his pains seem somewhat assuaged. Let him but awake: the vision vanishes - twofold hunger and despair remain! And tomorrow, it may be, I shall die!... And there will not be left on earth one being who has understood me completely. Some will consider me worse, others, better, than I have been in reality... Some will say: 'he was a good fellow'; others: 'a villain.' And both epithets will be false. After all this, is life worth the trouble? And yet we live - out of curiosity! We expect something new... How absurd, and yet how vexatious!"

"Women love only those whom they do not know!"

"Russian ladies, for the most part, cherish only Platonic love, without mingling any thought of matrimony with it; and Platonic love is exceedingly embarrassing."

"A strange thing, the human heart in general, and woman's heart in particular."

"Of two friends, one is always the slave of the other, although frequently neither acknowledges the fact to himself."

"One should never spurn a penitent criminal: in his despair he may become twice as much a criminal as before."

"The history of a man's soul, even the pettiest soul, is hardly less interesting and useful than the history of a whole people; especially when the former is the result of the observations of a mature mind upon itself, and has been written without any egotistical desire of arousing sympathy or astonishment. Rousseau's Confessions has precisely this defect – he read it to his friends."

"The chain of young life is broken, The journey is ended, the hour has struck, it is time to leave, Time to go where there is no future, No past, no eternity, no years; Where there are no expectations, no passions, No bitter tears, no fame, no honour; Where memory sleeps deeply And the heart in its narrow coffin home Does not feel the worm gnawing it."

"In simple hearts the feeling for the beauty and grandeur of nature is a hundred-fold stronger and more vivid than in us, ecstatic composers of narratives in words and on paper."

"He has done his country and his nature no ordinary service. He has brought romance almost into our own times, and made the nobleness of humanity familiar to our daily thoughts. He has enriched history to us by opening such varied and delicious vistas to our gaze, beneath the range of its loftier events and more public characters."

"The feelings to which Scott's poetry appeals, the ideals which it sets before the imagination, if not themselves the highest types of character, are those out of which the highest characters are formed. Cardinal Newman has said, "What is Christian high-mindedness, generous self-denial, contempt of wealth, endurance of suffering, and earnest striving after perfection, but an improvement and transformation, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, of that natural character of mind which we call romantic?" To have awakened and kept alive in an artificial, and too money-loving age, "that character of mind which we call romantic," which, by transformation, can become something so much beyond itself, is, even from the severest moral point of view, no mean merit. To higher than this few poets can lay claim. But let the critics praise him, or let them blame. It matters not. His reputation will not wane, but will grow with time. Therefore we do well to make much of Walter Scott. He is the only Homer who has been vouchsafed to Scotland—I might almost say to modern Europe. He came at the latest hour, when it was possible for a great epic minstrel to be born. And the altered conditions of the world will not admit of another."

"In my twelfth year, when it came to be the turn of Scott, the Lay of the Last Minstrel almost turned my head. I had never believed poetry could be so fascinating, and for some time I would not read another poem, not even by Scott himself. It was impossible, I remember saying, that any other poem could be equal to that. I was reluctant to spoil the spell, even by listening to Scott himself. But after a time I tried Marmion, and was reassured. Marmion was better even than the Lay, and the scene where Constance was bricked up alive in Holy Isle for her guilty love for Marmion thrilled me with the strongest emotion I had up to that time ever received from printed page. Lady of the Lake followed, then Scott's charm was exhausted. None of his other poems influenced me in the least."

"Scott will be severely judged by critics who hold, with Carlyle, that an author should be a prophet. Scott was neither a Wordsworth nor a Goethe, but an ‘auld Wat’ come again, and forced by circumstances to substitute publishing for cattle-lifting. The sword was still intrinsically superior in his eyes to the pen. His strong commonsense and business training kept him from practical anachronisms, and gave that tinge of ‘worldliness’ to his character which Lockhart candidly admits, but his life was an embodiment of the genial and masculine virtues of the older type so fondly celebrated in his writings. A passionate patriotism in public and cordial loyalty to his friends mark his whole career. A chief (in one of his favourite quotations) should be ‘a hedge about his friends, a heckle to his foes.’ He was too magnanimous to have personal foes, and no petty jealousy entangled him in a literary squabble. His history is a long record of hearty friendships."

"Then we turned to Scott, whom he [William Ewart Gladstone] held to be by far the greatest of his countrymen. I suggested John Knox. "No, the line must be drawn firm between the writer and the man of action; no comparisons there." J. M.—Well, then, though I love Scott so much that if any man chooses to put him first, I won't put him second, yet is there not a vein of pure gold in Burns that gives you pause? Mr. G.—Burns very fine and true, no doubt; but to imagine a whole group of characters, to marshal them, to set them to work, to sustain the action—I must count that the test of highest and most diversified quality."

"During the first quarter of this century a great poet was raised up in the North, who, whatever were his defects, has contributed by his works, in prose and verse, to prepare men for some closer and more practical approximation to Catholic truth. The general need of something deeper and more attractive than what had offered itself elsewhere, may be considered to have led to his popularity; and by means of his popularity he re-acted on his readers, stimulating their mental thirst, feeding their hopes, setting before them visions, which, when once seen, are not easily forgotten, and silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles. Doubtless there are things in the poems and romances in question, of which a correct judgment is forced to disapprove; and which must be ever a matter of regret; but contrasted with the popular writers of the last century, with its novelists, and some of its most admired poets, as Pope, they stand almost as oracles of Truth confronting the ministers of error and sin."

"There never was such a novelist and there never again will be another such... But with all his unquestionable merits, Scott was a sad bigot. Look at his Monastery; he makes the monks all fools or knaves. What a strange conception he must have had of monks! If Scott were to write that book at the present time, how differently would he not write it! The progress of knowledge and public enlightenment has been rapid. The stale old calumnies against priests and monks which were some years ago currently received as undeniable truths, are now in a great measure exploded. A great writer who should at the present day paint a community of the Catholic clergy as being such rogues or imbecile dolts as those with whom Scott has peopled his Monastery, would thereby degrade himself and mar the reputation of his works."

"I am of course aware that there were other influences on Scott besides medieval literature and that sometimes there are alternative sources for a particular motif or detail or point of style. I cannot always pin Scott down to a medieval source to the exclusion of other possible sources. In such cases it is altogether conceivable that three or four or more literary works from different periods of literary history were on his mind at the same time. If so, I am inclined to believe that medieval romance weighed most heavily because of his utter fascination with literature of this sort during his formative years. Although he also read widely in other literature at an early age, ballads and old romances were his passion... I point out what Scott has borrowed and show how he has used the borrowing. When he has covered his tracks, I cannot always say which romance is involved... but the accumulation of interesting parallels provides good circumstantial evidence in support of my belief that medieval romance is the most important source for the Waverly Novels."

"Scott’s novels are the great source of the paralysing ideology of defeatism in Scotland, the spread of which is responsible at once for the acceptance of the Union and the low standard of nineteenth-century Scots literature."