Critics From The United Kingdom

"For you knew not it was I, And I knew not it was you. We have learnt, as days went by. But a flower struck root and grew Underground, and no one knew."

"Rome in the ages, dimmed with all her towers, Floats in the midst, a little cloud at tether."

"[R]ight language enlarges the soul as no other power or influence may do."

"Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide, Like all created things, secrets from me, And stand a barrier to eternity."

"My heart shall be thy garden. Come, my own,  Into thy garden; thine be happy hours Among my fairest thoughts, my tallest flowers,  From root to crowning petal thine alone."

"O daisy mine, what will it be to look From God's side even of such a simple thing?"

"Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn, Unseen, this colourless sky of folded showers, And folded winds; no blossom in the bowers; A poet's face asleep in this grey morn. Now in the midst of the old world forlorn A mystic child is set in these still hours. I keep this time, even before the flowers, Sacred to all the young and the unborn."

"It is principally for the sake of the leg that a change in the dress of man is so much to be desired.[…] The leg is the best part of the figure,[…] and the best leg is the man's.[…] But man should no longer disguise the long lines, the strong forms in those lengths of piping or tubing that are of all garments the most stupid."

"Thou art like silence unperplexed,  A secret and a mystery Between one footfall and the next."

"[N]o mirror keeps its glances."

"If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind."

"Now, in our opinion, no author should be blamed for obscurity; nor should any pains be grudged in the effort to understand him, provided that he has done his best to be intelligible. Difficult thoughts are quite distinct from difficult words. Difficulty of thought is the very heart of poetry."

"There is nothing in the world more peaceful than apple-leaves with an early moon."

"This moment's Tiber with his shining eyes  Never saw Rome before."

"The most beautiful of all gardens is assuredly not that which is rather forest or field than garden, the 'landscape garden' of false taste; nor, on the other hand, the shaven and trimmed and weeded parterre with an unstarred lawn; but rather the garden long ago strictly planned, rigidly ordered, architecturally piled, smooth and delicate, but later set free, given over to time and the sun; not a wilderness, but having an enclosed wilderness, a directed liberty, a designed magnificence and excess."

" My day-mind can endure Upright, in hope, all it must undergo.  But O, afraid, unsure, My night-mind waking lies too low, too low."

"The quality of poetry is not strained. It has not to abide our repeated questions. It tests and is not tested. Every true lover of poetry knows that when he cites great lines it is not the poetry but the hearer that is to be judged."

"Round the blue sea I love the best  The argent foam played, slender, fleet; I saw—past Wordsworth and the rest—  Her natural, Greek, and silver feet."

"Compassion in the highest degree is the divinest form of religion."

"Life, light, and distance—in poetry—seem to leave on the mind's eye the impression of red, yellow, and blue, radiant less or more according as the life is less or more impassioned, the light celestial, and the space remote."

"It is for fear of the grown-up, or at least out of respect towards them, that a chapter must be given to fairies. If the children do not care very much for fairies, they must be made to care. "Who is to care if they do not? Who is to be properly childlike if they are not?""

"I wish it were not customary to write of one art in the terms of another, and I use the words "music" and "musical" under protest, because the world has been so delighted to call any verse pleasant to the ear "musical," that it has not supplied us with another and more specialised and appropriate word."

"It may well be doubted whether children are generally credulous.[…] For children do not believe in fairies a jot. I have just asked my youngest daughter whether she believed in them, and she said "Of course not—only I liked the stories." Fiction to children is fiction and not fact."

" With this ambiguous earth His dealings have been told us. These abide: The signal to a maid, the human birth, The lesson, and the young Man crucified."

"The pretty game of calling on the children of the audience of "Peter Pan" to declare their faith in fairies seemed to me disastrous—a game of men and women at the expense of children, a cumbersome frolic at best and an artificial, a tyrannous use of the adult sense of sentimental humour against the helpless. I could with better conscience use my superior physical strength upon them than exploit them for love of my own condescension. (And yet Sir J. Barrie has written the most adorable "pretending" story ever written about a child.)No, children love a fairy story not because they think it true, but because they think it untrue, and because it makes no fraudulent appeal to their excellent good sense. That sense they are delighted to put aside while they "pretend." That is their own word.[…] "Let's pretend," not "Let's believe." Their mother does not put "Let's pretend" into the child's mouth; she finds it there. Without it there is no play. But the pretending is always drama and never deception or self-deception."

"Men in cities look upward not much more than animals, and these—except the dog when he bays the moon—look skyward not at all."

" But in the eternities, Doubtless we shall compare together, hear A million alien Gospels, in what guise He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear."

"The smoke of a cigarette, more sensitive in motion than breath or blood, has its waves so multitudinously inflected and reinflected, with such flights and such delays, it flows and bends upon currents of so subtle influence and impulse as to include the most active, impetuous, and lingering curls ever drawn by the finest Oriental hand—and that is not a Hindu hand, nor any hand of Aryan race. The Japanese has captured the curve of the section of a sea-wave—its flow, relaxation, and fall; but this is a single moment, whereas the line of cigarette-smoke in a still room fluctuates in twenty delicate directions."

"A sense of art mixes with our modern piety. We are apt to admire the evangelical reticence for its dignity,[…] we are apt to respect the Scripture narratives with their few intense details, their close events and their great omissions alike, for their simplicity, and—it is to be feared that our literature leads us so far—for their "effect.""

"[T]he sense of humour has other things to do than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter."

"The mothers of all ages are those who have suffered because others suffered; for each of them, self is less sensitive than the sense of her child. Self is not locked up in the maternal heart, there to be cherished, as it is by the egoist, or to be crushed and silenced, as it is by the Saint. In the mother, self is not lost, but loses all its evil by the passionate personal love that distributes it among sons and daughters. Perfect self-less love would perhaps be distributed through the multitude, but a mother is not perfect: nature has so much use for her—separate, family use—that she cannot let her go free from irrational, indispensable partialities and limitings, even injustices, all serving the turn of the race."

"A wall is the safeguard of simplicity."

" The travelling heart went free With endless streams; that strife was stopped; And down a thousand vales I dropped,  I flowed to Italy."

"Flocks of the memories of the day draw near The dovecote doors of sleep."

"[T]here is nothing so exacting, so difficult, so various, as the consistency of a complete theory, nothing so overwhelming to a slothful student."

"Children appeal to us by a variant of the quality of pathos."

"[S]he used her intellect, and that action is the vitality of all poetry that is not song only, but poetry and song."

"[W]hat is now and then attempted is perhaps "for art's sake." He that saveth his art shall lose it."

" Thou inmost, ultimate Council of judgment, palace of decrees Where the high senses hold their spiritual state,  Sued by earth's embassies, And sign, approve, accept, conceive, create."

"What else, indeed, should mediocrity be but widespread, anywhere?"

"Surely there is but one assumption […] wherewith nearly all thinkers […] have done their work—that is, the confession of the moral law: that there is a good, and that pure cruelty, mere hatred, and ingratitude, for example, are contrary thereto."

"[I]t is doubtful whether we may name any weak thing as typically spiritual."

"She walks—the lady of my delight—  A shepherdess of sheep. Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white;  She guards them from the steep; She feeds them on the fragrant height,  And folds them in for sleep."

"From the shaken tower A flock of bells take flight And go with the hour."

"To mount a hill is to lift with you something lighter and brighter than yourself or than any meaner burden. You lift the world, you raise the horizon; you give a signal for the distance to stand up."

"It is not extravagance, it is not excitement, it is not excess, or dizziness, or delirium, that chastises habitual pleasure in art, but only dullness.[…] One of the Latin races, having the dullness and keeping wit enough to name it, has the word for it—banalité."

"[A]n English wit has well said that affectation displeases us because it has not too much, but too little, art."

"[I]t would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like rhetoric and the arts, a habit."

"There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a child's foot runs."

"If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds."