From “Irish Melodies”
O THE DAYS are gone when beauty bright
My heart’s chain wove!
When my dream of life, from morn till night,
Was love, still love!
New hope may bloom,
And days may come,
Of milder, calmer beam,
But there ’s nothing half so sweet in life
As love’s young dream!
O...
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Our life is twofold; sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off our... -
In slumbers of midnight the sailor-boy lay;
His hammock swung loose at the sport of the wind;
But watch-worn and weary, his cares flew away,
And visions of happiness danced o’er his mind.He dreamt of his home, of his dear native bowers,
And pleasures that waited on life’s merry morn,
While Memory stood sideways, half covered with flowers... -
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... -
’t Was in the prime of summer time,
An evening calm and cool,
And four-and-twenty happy boys
Came bounding out of school;
There were some that ran, and some that leapt
Like troutlets in a pool.Away they sped with gamesome minds
And souls untouched by sin;
To a level mead they came, and there
They drave the... -
Methought I saw him but I knew him not;
He was so changed from what he used to be,
There was no redness on his woe-worn cheek,
No sunny smile upon his ashy lips,
His hollow wandering eyes looked wild and fierce,
And grief was printed on his marble brow,
And O I thought he clasped his wasted hands,
... -
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DEAR love, for nothing less than thee
Would I have broke this happy dream;
It was a theme
For reason, much too strong for fantasy.
Therefore thou waked'st me wisely; yet
My dream thou brokest not, but continued'st it.
Thou art so true that thoughts of thee... -
PHOEBUS, expell'd by the approaching night,
Blush'd, and for shame clos'd in his bashful light,
While I, with leaden Mopheus overcome,
The Muse whom I adore, enter'd the room.
Her hair, with looser curiosity,
Did on her comely back dishevelle'd lie;
Her eyes... -
Let me not mar that perfect Dream
By an Auroral stain
But so adjust my daily Night
That it will come again.
Not when we know, the Power accosts —
The Garment of Surprise
Was all our timid Mother wore
At Home — in Paradise.