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Two voices are there; one is of the sea, One of the mountains: each a mighty Voice.
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What is pride? A rocket that emulates the stars.
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Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man.
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Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, And shares the nature of infinity.
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All that we behold is full of blessings.
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Enough, if something from our hands have power To live, and act, and serve the future hour; And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower, We feel that we are greater than we know.
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The moving accident is not my trade; To freeze the blood I have no ready arts: 'Tis my delight, alone in summer shade, To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts.
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Wisdom married to immortal verse.
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What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.
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It may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.... They both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said to be of the same substance, their affections are kindred, and almost identical, not necessarily differing even in degree; Poetry sheds no tears "such as Angels weep," but natural and human tears; she can boast of no celestial ichor that distinguishes her vital juices from those of prose; the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both.
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And when the stream Which overflowed the soul was passed away, A consciousness remained that it had left Deposited upon the silent shore Of memory images and precious thoughts That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed.
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Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own; Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, And, even with something of a mother's mind, And no unworthy aim, The homely nurse doth all she can To make her foster child, her inmate man, Forget the glories he hath known And that imperial palace whence he came.
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That blessed mood in which the burthen of the mystery, in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened.
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Action is transitory, a step, a blow, The motion of a muscle, this way or that, 'Tis done--And in the after-vacancy, We wonder at ourselves, like men betrayed.
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The feather, whence the pen Was shaped that traced the lives of these good men, Dropped from an angel's wing.
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Come forth into the light of things, let nature be your teacher.
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A babe, by intercourse of touch I held mute dialogues with my Mother's heart.
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The clouds that gather round the setting sun, Do take a sober colouring from an eye, That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality.
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That inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude.
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Prompt to move but firm to wait - knowing things rashly sought are rarely found.
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In ourselves our safety must be sought. By our own right hand it must be wrought.
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Yet tears to human suffering are due; And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown Are mourned by man, and not by man alone.
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Great is the glory, for the strife is hard!
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Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.