The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?

We look before and after,And pine for what is not;Our sincerest laughterWith some pain is fraught;Our sweetest songs are those that tell Of saddest thought.

The being called God…bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar.

Joy, joy, joy!Past ages crowd on thee, but each one remembers,And the future is dark, and the present is spread,Like a pillow of thorns for thy slumberless head.

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

Soul meets soul on lovers lips.

A LamentO world! O life! O time!On whose last steps I climb,Trembling at that where I had stood before;When will return the glory of your prime?No more — Oh, never more!Out of the day and...

If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.

Our sweetest songs are those of saddest thought.

Though we eat little flesh and drink no wine,Yet let’s be merry; we’ll have tea and toast;Custards for supper, and an endless hostOf syllabubs and jellies and mincepies,And other such ladylike luxuries.

I have drunken deep of joy,And I will taste no other wine tonight.

There was a Being whom my spirit oftMet on its visioned wanderings far aloft.A seraph of Heaven, too gentle to be human,Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman….

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that...

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The...

You ought not to love the individuals of your domestic circle less, but to love those who exist beyond it more. Once make the feelings of confidence and of affection universal, and the distinctions of...

OzymandiasI met a traveller from an antique landWho said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. Near them on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frownAnd wrinkled lip and sneer...

See the mountains kiss high HeavenAnd the waves clasp one another;No sister-flower would be forgivenIf it disdained its brother;And the sunlight clasps the earth,And the moonbeams kiss the sea -What is all this sweet work...

And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art

In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.

A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.

I arise from dreams of thee,And a spirit in my feetHas led me- who knows how?To thy chamber-window, Sweet!

And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare...

The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys:Power, like a desolating pestilence,Pollutes whate’er it touches, and obedience,Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,A mechanised automaton.

Lift Not The Painted VeilLift not the painted veil which those who liveCall Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,And it but mimic all we would believeWith colours idly spread,–behind, lurk FearAnd Hope, twin Destinies;...

Every fanatic or enemy of virtue is not at liberty to misrepresent the greatest geniuses and most heroic defenders of all that is valuable in this mortal world.

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted

Love withers under constraints. Its very essence is liberty; it is comparable neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear; it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its votaries are in confidence, equality and unreserve.

Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory.

O weep for Adonis – He is dead.” “Peace. He is not dead he doth not sleep – he hath wakened from the dream of life

God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi rests on the theist.

When soul meets soul on lovers’ lips.

Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure...

And I have fitted up some chambers thereLooking towards the golden Eastern air,And level with the living winds, which flowLike waves above the living waves below.—I have sent books and music there, and allThose instruments...

Music, When Soft Voices DieMusic, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory; Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken. Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heap’d for the...

If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our...

PoetryLove’s PhilosophyThe fountains mingle with the river And the rivers with the ocean, The winds of heaven mix for ever With a sweet emotion; Nothing in the world is single, All things by a law...

I can give not what men call love;But wilt thou accept notThe worship the heart lifts aboveAnd the heavens reject not:The desire of the moth for the star,Of the night for the morrow,The devotion to...

We rest; a dream has power to poison sleep.We rise; one wand’ring thought pollutes the day.We feel, conceive, or reason; laugh or weep,Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away;It is the same: for, be...

The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a...

Human vanity is so constituted that it stiffens before difficulties. The more an object conceals itself from our eyes, the greater the effort we make to seize it, because it pricks our pride, it excites...

Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may last!

The MoonIAnd, like a dying lady lean and pale,Who totters forth, wrapp’d in a gauzy veil,Out of her chamber, led by the insaneAnd feeble wanderings of her fading brain,The moon arose up in the murky...

Whether that lady’s gentle mind, No longer with the form combinedWhich scattered love, as stars do light, Found sadness where it left delight,I dare not guess; but in this lifeOf error, ignorance, and strife,Where nothing...

No more let life divide what death can join together.

At the very time that philosophers of the most enterprising benevolence were founding in Greece those institutions which have rendered it the wonder and luminary of the world, am I required to believe that the...

And the Spring arose on the garden fair,Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breastRose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

He wanders, like a day-appearing dream,Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.

There is eloquence in the tonguelesswind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of thereeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to somethingwithin the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance...