Great Throughts Treasury

"Once pass'd I blindfold here, at any hour, now seldom come I, since I came with him. That single elm-tree bright against the west?I miss it! Is it gone?"

"One has often wondered whether upon the whole earth there is anything so unintelligent, so unapt to perceive how the world is really going, as an ordinary young Englishman of our upper class."

"One moment, on the rapid's top, our boat hung poised ?and then the darting river of life (such now, methought, it was), the river of life, loud thundering, bore us by; swift, swift it foamed, black under cliffs it raced, round headlands shone."

"One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common - discontent."

"One must, I think, be struck more and more the longer one lives, to find how much in our present society a man's life of each day depends for its solidity and value upon whether he reads during that day, and far more still on what he reads during it."

"Only--but this is rare--when a beloved hand is laid in ours, when, jaded with the rush and glare of the interminable hours, our eyes can in another's eyes read clear, when our world-deafen'd ear is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd-- a bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, and a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, and what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know. A man becomes aware of his life's flow, and hears its winding murmur; and he sees the meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze."

"Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class."

"Our fathers water'd with their tears this sea of time whereon we sail, their voices were in all men's ears who pass'd within their puissant hail. Still the same ocean round us raves, but we stand mute, and watch the waves."

"Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly."

"Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask ? Thou smilest and art still, out-topping knowledge."

"Peace, peace is what I seek and public calm, Endless extinction of unhappy hates."

"People think that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is ! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style."

"Philistine gives the notion of something particularly stiff-necked and perverse in the resistance to light and its children; and therein it specially suits our middle-class."

"Philistinism! - We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing."

"Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of light."

"Physician of the Iron Age, Goethe has done his pilgrimage. He took the suffering human race, he read each wound, each weakness clear ? and struck his finger on the place, and said ? Thou ailest here, and here."

"Poetry a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty."

"Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power."

"Powerful attachment will give a man spirit and confidence which he could by no means call up or command of himself; and in this mood he can do wonders which would not be possible to him without it."

"Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life."

"Radiant with ardor divine! Beacons of Hope ye appear! Languor is not in your heart, weakness is not in your word, weariness not on your brow."

"Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and wisely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance."

"Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty."

"Sad Patience, too near neighbor to despair."

"Sanity - that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power."

"Saw life steadily and saw it whole."

"Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep, where the winds are all asleep."

"Sects of men are apt to be shut up in sectarian ideas of their own, and to be less open to new general ideas than the main body of men."

"Screen'd is this nook o'er the high, half-reap'd field, and here till sundown, shepherd, will i be. Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep, and round green roots and yellowing stalks i see pale blue convolvulus in tendrils creep: and air-swept lindens yield their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers of bloom on the bent grass where i am laid, and bower me from the august sun with shade; and the eye travels down to oxford's towers."

"Sin is not a monster to be mused on, but an impotence to be got rid of."

"Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come: and on the beach undid his corded bales."

"Singing, Here came a mortal, but faithless was she: and alone dwell forever."

"So, loath to suffer mute. We, peopling the void air, make Gods to whom to impute the ills we ought to bear."

"Six years--six little years--six drops of time."

"Sophocles long ago heard it on the Aegaean, and it brought into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery; we find also in the sound a thought, hearing it by this distant northern sea."

"So much unlearnt, so much resign'd? I come not here to be your foe! I seek these anchorites, not in ruth, to curse and to deny your truth."

"Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom - all, which makes death a hideous show."

"Still doth the soul, from its lone fastness high, upon our life a ruling effluence send. And when it fails, fight as we will, we die; and while it lasts, we cannot wholly end."

"Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore."

"Still, after many years, in distant lands, still nourishing in thy bewildered brain that wild, unquenched, deep-sunken, old-world pain? say, will it never heal?"

"Strew on her roses, roses, And never a spray of yew! In quiet she reposes; Ah, would that I did too!"

"Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade, with a free, onward impulse brushing through, by night, the silver?d branches of the glade."

"Style... is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it."

"Such a price the Gods exact for song; to become what we sing."

"Tasks in hours of insight willed, in hours of gloom must be fulfilled."

"That sweet city with her dreaming spires"

"That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation."

"The ?hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and, pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits,? this good fellow carried hidden in his nature, apparently, something destined to develop into a necessity for humane letters."

"The banners flashing through the trees make their blood dance and chain their eyes; that bugle-music on the breeze arrests them with a charm'd surprise. Banner by turns and bugle woo: ye shy recluses, follow too!"

"The beginning is always today."