Poets From England

"This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the Exhibition of 1851 or thereabouts—the pleasure in this particular form of human disgrace—has passed, leaving one trace only: the habit by which some men reproach a silly woman though her sex, whereas a silly man is not reproached through his sex."

"The majority can tell ordinary truth, but they should not trust themselves for truth extraordinary."

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

"[T]here is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be mortal."

"I came from nothing; but from where Come these undying thoughts I bear?"

"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."

"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."

"In the case of the woman's figure it is the foot, with its extreme proportional smallness, that gives the precious instability, the spring and balance that are so organic."

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

"Hamlet, being a little mad, feigned madness. It is when I am angry that I pretend to be angry, so as to present the truth in an obvious and intelligible form."

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

"  I am dark but fair, Black but fair."

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

"I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,  I shun the thought that lurks in all delight—  The thought of thee—and in the blind Heaven's height, And in the sweetest passage of a song."

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

"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."

"O Spring, I know thee! Seek for sweet surprise  In the young children's eyes. But I have learnt the years, and know the yet  Leaf-folded violet."

"The eyelids confess, and reject, and refuse to reject. They have expressed all things ever since man was man.And they express so much by seeming to hide or to reveal that which indeed expresses nothing. For there is no message from the eye. It has direction, it moves, in the service of the sense of sight; it receives the messages of the world. But expression is outward, and the eye has it not. There are no windows of the soul, there are only curtains."

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

"I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart."

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

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

"There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting out of a child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much confidence."

"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."

"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."

"[N]o mirror keeps its glances."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"[E]xaggeration establishes no good understanding between the reader and the author. It is a solemn appeal to our credulity, and we are right to resent it. It is the violence of a weakling hand—the worst manner of violence."

"Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as children are they would yet find so many things at table to be detestable."

"[S]ome things must needs gain in mystery before we can at all undertake to think upon them. Without mystery they are all obscure. Who can think, for instance, of the infinity of space without adding inconceivable things to his meditation?"

"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?""

"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."

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

" 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."

" 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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"A wall is the safeguard of simplicity."

"[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."

"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."

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

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

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