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...
My minde to me a kingdom is;
Such perfect joy therein I finde
As farre exceeds all earthly blisse
That God or nature hath assignde;
Though much I want that most would have,
Yet still my minde forbids to crave.
Content I live; this is my stay,—
I seek no more than may suffice.
I presse to beare no haughtie sway;
...
From the Latin by Charles Abraham Elton
YES,—I am poor, Callistratus! I own;
And so was ever; yet not quite unknown,
Graced with a knight’s degree; nor this alone:
But through the world my verse is often sung;
And “That is he!” sounds buzzed from every tongue;
And what to few, when dust, the Fates assign,
In bloom and freshness of my days...
When all is done and said, in the end this shall you find:
He most of all doth bathe in bliss that hath a quiet mind;
And, clear from worldly cares, to dream can be content
The sweetest time in all this life in thinking to be spent.
The body subject is to fickle Fortune’s power,
And to a million of mishaps is casual every hour;
And death in...
From “Endymion,” Book I.
A THING of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of...
He planted an oak in his father’s park
And a thought in the minds of men,
And he bade farewell to his native shore,
Which he never will see again.
Oh merrily stream the tourist throng
To the glow of the Southern sky;
A vision of pleasure beckons them on,
But he went there to die.
The oak will grow and its boughs will...
He sat among the woods; he heard
The sylvan merriment; he saw
The pranks of butterfly and bird,
The humors of the ape, the daw.
And in the lion or the frog,—
In all the life of moor and fen,—
In ass and peacock, stork and dog,
He read similitudes of men.
“Of these, from those,” he cried, “we come,
Our hearts...
Fair are the flowers and the children, but their subtle suggestion is fairer;
Rare is the roseburst of dawn, but the secret that clasps it is rarer;
Sweet the exultance of song, but the strain that precedes it is sweeter;
And never was poem yet writ, but the meaning outmastered the metre.
Never a daisy that grows, but a mystery guideth the growing;
...
From “Myth and Romance”
THERE is no rhyme that is half so sweet
As the song of the wind in the rippling wheat;
There is no metre that ’s half so fine
As the lilt of the brook under rock and vine;
And the loveliest lyric I ever heard
Was the wildwood strain of a forest bird.—
If the wind and the brook and the bird would teach
My...
From “Festus”
HE had no times of study, and no place;
All places and all times to him were one.
His soul was like the wind-harp, which he loved,
And sounded only when the spirit blew,
Sometime in feasts and follies, for he went
Lifelike through all things; and his thoughts then rose
Like sparkles in the bright wine, brighter still;...
