From the “Inner Temple Masque”
STEER hither, steer your wingèd pines,
All beaten mariners:
Here lie undiscovered mines,
A prey to passengers;
Perfumes far sweeter than the best
That make the phœnix urn and nest:
Fear not your ships,
Nor any to oppose you save our lips;
But come on shore,
...
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Ever eating, never cloying,
All-devouring, all-destroying,
Never finding full repast
Till I eat the world at last. -
From the German by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
[Greek]
(“The mills of the gods grind late, but they grind fine.”)
—Greek Poet.THOUGH the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness grinds he all. -
I Made a posie, while the day ran by:
“Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie
My life within this band.”
But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away,
And withered in my hand.My hand was next to them, and then my heart;
I took, without more thinking, in good part... -
Hence, loathed Melancholy,
Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born,
In Stygian cave forlorn,
’Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy!
Find out some uncouth cell,
Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings,
And the night-raven sings;
There under ebon shades, and low-browed rocks,
As ragged as thy locks,... -
Hence, vain deluding joys,
The brood of Folly without father bred!
How little you bestead,
Or fill the fixèd mind with all your toys!
Dwell in some idle brain,
And fancies fond with gaudy shapes possess,
As thick and numberless
As the gay motes that people the sunbeams,—
Or likest hovering dreams,
The tickle... -
From “Verses upon His Divine Poesy”
THE SEAS are quiet when the winds give o’er;
So calm are we when passions are no more.
For then we know how vain it was to boast
Of fleeting things, too certain to be lost.
Clouds of affection from our younger eyes
Conceal that emptiness which age descries.The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed...
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From the Spanish by Edward Fitzgerald
From “Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made of”AND yet—and yet—in these our ghostly lives,
Half night, half day, half sleeping, half awake,
How if our waking life, like that of sleep,
Be all a dream in that eternal life
To which we wake not till we sleep in death?
How if, I say, the senses we now trust... -
From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began;
When Nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay,
And could not heave her head
The tuneful voice was heard from high,
Arise, ye more than dead!
Then cold and hot, and moist and dry,
In order to their stations leap,
And Music’... -
From “The Davideis”
AWAKE, awake, my Lyre!
And tell thy silent master’s humble tale
In sounds that may prevail;
Sounds that gentle thoughts inspire:
Though so exalted she,
And I so lowly be,
Tell her, such different notes make all thy harmony.Hark! how the strings awake:
And, though the moving hand approach not near,...