Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?
Robert Browning
I give the fight up: let there be an end, a privacy, an obscure nook for me. I want to be forgotten even by God.
Grow old with me! The best is yet to be.
Motherhood: All love begins and ends there.
Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.
The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate!
Fail I alone, in words and deeds? Why, all men strive and who succeeds?
Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.
Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
My sun sets to rise again.
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, sleep to wake.
A minute's success pays the failure of years.
Love is energy of life.
I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time.
Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone, Not God's, and not the beast's; God is, they are, Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture!
Measure your mind's height by the shade it casts.
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round.
Love, hope, fear, faith - these make humanity; These are its sign and note and character.
What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.
Ignorance is not innocence but sin.
No, when the fight begins within himself, A man's worth something.
So, fall asleep love, loved by me... for I know love, I am loved by thee.
Oh, the little more, and how much it is! And the little less, and what worlds away.
If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best thing God invents.
Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.
God is the perfect poet.
What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.
Ambition is not what man does... but what man would do.
What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?
But what if I fail of my purpose here? It is but to keep the nerves at strain, to dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall, and baffled, get up and begin again.
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure.
Only I discern Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn.
White shall not neutralize the black, nor good compensate bad in man, absolve him so: life's business being just the terrible choice.
Oh, to be in England now that April's there.
How good is man's life, the mere living! How fit to employ all the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy!
Every one soon or late comes round by Rome.
Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.
Never the time and the place and the loved one all together!
All June I bound the rose in sheaves, Now, rose by rose, I strip the leaves.
Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.
The sea heaves up, hangs loaded o'er the land, Breaks there, and buries its tumultuous strength.
A face to lose youth for, to occupy age With the dream of, meet death with.
Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!
But how carve way i' the life that lies before, If bent on groaning ever for the past?
You should not take a fellow eight years old and make him swear to never kiss the girls.
The moment eternal - just that and no more - When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut, and lips meet!
What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.
I count life just a stuff to try the soul's strength on.
Why comes temptation but for man to meet And master and make crouch beneath his foot, And so be pedestaled in triumph?
