Essayists From England

"Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,"

"Let the long contention cease! Geese are swans, and swans are geese. Let them have it how they will! Thou art tired; best be still."

"So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry, From the wet field, through the vext garden-trees, Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze: The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I!"

"Why faintest thou! I wander’d till I died. Roam on! The light we sought is shining still. Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill, Our Scholar travels yet the loved hillside."

"A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain."

"Homer is rapid in his movement, Homer is plain in his words and style, Homer is simple in his ideas, Homer is noble in his manner. Cowper renders him ill because he is slow in his movement, and elaborate in his style; Pope renders him ill because he is artificial both in his style and in his words; Chapman renders him ill because he is fantastic in his ideas; Mr. Newman renders him ill because he is odd in his words and ignoble in his manner."

"Are ye too changed, ye hills? See, ’tis no foot of unfamiliar men Tonight from Oxford up your pathway strays! Here came I often, often, in old days; Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then."

"The signal-elm, that looks on Ilsley Downs, The Vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames."

"The great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay"

"On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence."

"Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and wisely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance."

"And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening."

"Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the children of the light."

"The notion of the free play of the mind upon all subjects being a pleasure in itself, being an object of desire, being an essential provider of elements without which a nation's spirit, whatever compensations it may have for them, must, in the long run, die of inanition, hardly enters into an Englishman's thoughts."

"I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world."

"It is not in my nature, some of my critics would rather say, not in my power, to dispute on behalf of any opinion, even my own, very obstinately. To try and approach truth on one side after another, not to strive or cry, nor to persist in pressing forward, on any one side, with violence and self-will, — it is only thus, it seems to me, that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious Goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline, but only thus even in outline. He who will do nothing but fight impetuously towards her on his own, one, favourite, particular line, is inevitably destined to run his head into the folds of the black robe in which she is wrapped."

"Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought."

"They out-talk’d thee, hiss’d thee, tore thee. Better men fared thus before thee; Fired their ringing shot and pass’d, Hotly charged — and broke at last."

"If what distinguishes the greatest poets is their powerful and profound application of ideas to life, which surely no good critic will deny, then to prefix to the word ideas here the term moral makes hardly any difference, because human life itself is in so preponderating a degree moral. It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life — to the question, How to live. Morals are often treated in a narrow and false fashion, they are bound up with systems of thought and belief which have had their day, they are fallen into the hands of pedants and professional dealers, they grow tiresome to some of us. We find attraction, at times, even in a poetry of revolt against them; in a poetry which might take for its motto Omar Khayam's words: "Let us make up in the tavern for the time which we have wasted in the mosque." Or we find attractions in a poetry indifferent to them, in a poetry where the contents may be what they will, but where the form is studied and exquisite. We delude ourselves in either case; and the best cure for our delusion is to let our minds rest upon that great and inexhaustible word life, until we learn to enter into its meaning. A poetry of revolt against moral ideas is a poetry of revolt against life; a poetry of indifference towards moral ideas is a poetry of indifference towards life."

"Steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, — to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side? — nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!"

"He went; his piping took a troubled sound Of storms that rage outside our happy ground; He could not wait their passing, he is dead!"

"Of these two literatures, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge — theology, philosophy, history, art, science — to see the object as in itself it really is."

"The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject."

"On the mind of an adversary one never makes the faintest impression."

"The translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author: — that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble."

"Oh, hide me in your gloom profound, Ye solemn seats of holy pain! Take me, cowl'd forms, and fence me round, Till I possess my soul again; Till free my thoughts before me roll, Not chafed by hourly false control!"

"But — if you cannot give us ease — Last of the race of them who grieve Here leave us to die out with these Last of the people who believe! Silent, while years engrave the brow; Silent — the best are silent now. Achilles ponders in his tent, The kings of modern thought are dumb, Silent they are though not content, And wait to see the future come. They have the grief men had of yore, But they contend and cry no more."

"What helps it now, that Byron bore, With haughty scorn which mock'd the smart, Through Europe to the Ætolian shore The pageant of his bleeding heart? That thousands counted every groan, And Europe made his woe her own?"

"For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment."

"But the majestic River floated on, Out of the mist and hum of that low land, Into the frosty starlight, and there mov’d, Rejoicing, through the hush’s Chorasmian waste, Under the solitary moon: he flow’d Right for the Polar Star, past Orgunjè, Brimming, and bright, and large: then sands begin To hem his watery march, and dam his streams, And split his currents; that for many a league The shorn and parcell’d Oxus strains along Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles — Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, A foil’d circuitous wanderer:—till at last The long’d-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bath’d stars Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea."

"All are before me! I behold The House, the Brotherhood austere! — And what am I, that I am here? For rigorous teachers seized my youth, And purged its faith, and trimm'd its fire, Show'd me the high, white star of Truth, There bade me gaze, and there aspire. Even now their whispers pierce the gloom: What dost thou in this living tomb?"

"Forgive me, masters of the mind! At whose behest I long ago So much unlearnt, so much resign'd — I come not here to be your foe! I seek these anchorites, not in ruth, To curse and to deny your truth; Not as their friend, or child, I speak! But as, on some far northern strand, Thinking of his own Gods, a Greek In pity and mournful awe might stand Before some fallen Runic stone — For both were faiths, and both are gone."

"So, on the bloody sand, Sohrab lay dead. And the great Rustum drew his horseman’s cloak Down o’er his face, and sate by his dead son. As those black granite pillars, once high-rear’d By Jemshid in Persepolis, to bear His house, now, mid their broken flights of steps, Lie prone, enormous, down the mountain side — So in the sand lay Rustum by his son."

"his head droop’d low, His limbs grew slack; motionless, white, he lay—"

"Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn."

"Critical power...tends to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by comparison with that which it displaces; to make the best ideas prevail."

"And youth and bloom, and this delightful world."

"And he saw that Youth, Of age and looks to be his own dear son, Piteous and lovely, lying on the sand, Like some rich hyacinth, which by the scythe Of an unskillful gardener has been cut, Mowing the garden grass-plots near its bed, And lies, a fragrant tower of purple bloom, On the mown, dying grass; — so Sohrab lay, Lovely in death, upon the common sand. And Rustum gazed on him with grief."

"Truth sits upon the lips of dying men, And falsehood, while I lived, was far from mine."

"for like the lightning to this field I came, and like the wind I go away — Sudden, and swift, and like a passing wind."

"and all the pleasant life they led, They three, in that long-distant summer-time — The castle and the dewy woods, and hunt And hound, and morn on those delightful hills In Ader-baijan."

"No horse's cry was that, most like the roar Of some pain'd desert-lion, who all day Hath trail'd the hunter's javelin in his side, And comes at night to die upon the sand."

"as the vast tide Of the bright rocking Ocean sets to shore At the full moon."

"They follow’d me, my hope, my fame, my star."

"his own early youth, And all its bounding rapture"

"An unlopp’d trunk it was, and huge, Still rough; like those which men in treeless plains ... fish from the flooded rivers."

"Who art thou then, that canst so touch my soul?"

"Girl! nimble with thy feet, not with thy hands! Curl'd minion, dancer, coiner of sweet words!"

"Charge once more, then, and be dumb! Let the victors, when they come, When the forts of folly fall, Find thy body by the wall."

"The crown of literature is poetry."