Our Poetical Favorites, Second Series: A Selection from the Best Minor Poems of the English Language, Comprising Chiefly Longer Poems, Volume 2

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Sheldon, 1876 - English poetry - 543 pages
 

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Page 89 - Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay : Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade ; A breath can make them as a breath has made : But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
Page 1 - How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. Sit, Jessica. Look, how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines...
Page 309 - And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel ; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease ; For Summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells.
Page 452 - So careful of the type she seems. So careless of the single life ; That I, considering everywhere Her secret meaning in her deeds. And finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear, I falter where I firmly trod, And falling with my weight of cares Upon the great world's altar-stairs That slope through darkness up to God, I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope.
Page 23 - Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee Jest, and youthful jollity, Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles, Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles, Such as hang on Hebe's cheek, And love to live in dimple sleek : Sport that wrinkled Care derides, And Laughter holding both his sides. Come, and trip it as you go, On the light fantastic toe...
Page 91 - Near yonder copse, where once the garden smiled, And still where many a garden-flower grows wild — There, where a few torn shrubs the place disclose — The village preacher's modest mansion rose. A man he was to all the country dear, And passing rich with forty pounds a year. Remote from towns he ran his godly race, Nor e'er had changed, nor wished to change, his place...
Page 307 - MY HEART aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk...
Page 93 - For, even though vanquished, he could argue still ; While words of learned length and thundering sound Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around ; And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew, That one small head could carry all he knew.
Page 309 - As she is famed to do, deceiving elf. Adieu ! adieu ! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades : Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music: — do I wake or sleep?
Page 151 - Alas ! they had been friends in youth ; But whispering tongues can poison truth; And constancy lives in realms above; And life is thorny; and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain.

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