My chest of books divide amongst my friends.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard, are sweeter.

There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.

Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.

So let me be thy choir, and make a moan

Upon the midnight hours.

Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;

Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees

Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees.

The sweet converse of an innocent mind.

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul.

I am certain I have not a right feeling towards women - at this moment I am striving to be just to them, but I cannot. Is it because they fall so far beneath my boyish imagination? When I was a schoolboy I thought a fair woman a pure Godess; my mind was a soft nest in which some one of them slept, though she knew it not.

You are always new. The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest; the last smile the brightest; the last movement the gracefullest.

Open afresh your round of starry folds,

Ye ardent marigolds!

The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is 'a vale of tears' from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven--what a little circumscribed notion! Call the world if you please "the vale of soul-making". Then you will find out the use of the world.

Time, that aged nurse,

Rocked me to patience.

Bards of Passion and of Mirth,

Ye have left your souls on earth!

Have ye souls in heaven too,

Double-lived in regions new?

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,

Before high piled books, in charact’ry,

Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never live to trace

Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!

That I shall never look upon thee more,

Never have relish in the faery power

Of unreflecting love! — then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

You might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore.

The poetry of earth is never dead.

I am, however young, writing at random — straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness — without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin?

Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks

Our ready minds to fellowship divine,

A fellowship with essence; till we shine,

Full alchemiz’d, and free of space. Behold

The clear religion of heaven!

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us — and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle or amaze with itself, but with its subject.

Ever let the Fancy roam,

Pleasure never is at home.

But strength alone though of the Muses born

Is like a fallen angel: trees uptorn,

Darkness, and worms, and shrouds, and sepulchres

Delight it; for it feeds upon the burrs,

And thorns of life; forgetting the great end

Of poesy, that it should be a friend

To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.

In drear-nighted December,

Too happy, happy tree,

Thy branches ne'er remember

Their green felicity.

To Sorrow

I bade good-morrow,

And thought to leave her far away behind;

But cheerly, cheerly,

She loves me dearly;

She is so constant to me, and so kind:

I would deceive her

And so leave her,

But ah! she is so constant and so kind.