Mightier far

Than strength of nerve or sinew, or the sway

Of magic potent over sun and star,

Is Love, though oft to agony distrest,

And though his favorite seat be feeble woman's breast.

Elysian beauty, melancholy grace,

Laodamia.

Brought from a pensive though a happy place.

Ibid.

He spake of love, such love as spirits feel
In worlds whose course is equable and pure;
No fears to beat away, no strife to heal,
The past unsighed for, and the future sure.

Of all that is most beauteous, imaged there
In happier beauty; more pellucid streams,
An ampler ether, a diviner air,
And fields invested with purpureal gleams.
Yet tears to human suffering are due;
And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown
Are mourned by man, and not by man alone.

But shapes that come not at an earthly call
Will not depart when mortal voices bid.

But thou that didst appear so fair
To fond imagination,

Dost rival in the light of day

Her delicate creation.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Dion.

Yarrow Visited.

'Tis hers to pluck the amaranthine flower
Of faith, and round the sufferer's temples bind
Wreaths that endure affliction's heaviest shower,
And do not shrink from sorrow's keenest wind.

Weak is the Will of Man.

We bow our heads before Thee, and we laud
And magnify thy name Almighty God!
But man is thy most awful instrument
In working out a pure intent.

Ode. Imagination before Content.

Sad fancies do we then affect,
In luxury of disrespect

To our own prodigal excess.
Of too familiar happiness.

That kill the bloom before its time,

And blanch, without the owner's crime,
The most resplendent hair.

Ode to Lycoris

Lament of Mary Queen of Scots.

The sightless Milton, with his hair
Around his placid temples curled;
And Shakespeare at his side, a freight,
If clay could think and mind were weight,
For him who bore the world!

The Italian Itinerant.

Meek Nature's evening comment on the shows
That for oblivion take their daily birth
From all the fuming vanities of earth.

Sky-Prospect from the Plain of France.

Desultory Stanza.

Turning, for them who pass, the common dust
Of servile opportunity to gold.

Babylon,

Learned and wise, hath perished utterly,

Nor leaves her speech one word to aid the sigh
That would lament her.

Ecclesiastical Sonnets. Part i. xxv. Missions and Travels.

As thou these ashes, little brook, wilt bear

Into the Avon, Avon to the tide

Of Severn, Severn to the narrow seas,

Into main ocean they, this deed accursed

An emblem yields to friends and enemies
How the bold teacher's doctrine, sanctified

By truth, shall spread, throughout the world dispersed.1
Part ii. xvii. To Wickliffe.

1 In obedience to the order of the Council of Constance (1415), the remains of Wickliffe were exhumed and burned to ashes, and these cast into the Swift. a neighbouring brook running hard by; and "thus this brook hath conveyed his ashes into Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the narrow seas, they into the main ocean. And thus the ashes of Wickliffe are the emblem of

The feather, whence the pen

Was shaped that traced the lives of these good men,
Dropped from an angel's wing.1

Ecclesiastical Sonnets.

Part iii. v.

Walton's Book of Lives.

Ibid.

Meek Walton's heavenly memory.

But who would force the soul tilts with a straw
Against a champion cased in adamant.

Part iii. vii. Persecution of the Scottish Covenanters.

Where music dwells

Lingering and wandering on as loth to die,

Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality.

Part iii. xliii. Inside of King's Chapel, Cambridge.

Or shipwrecked, kindles on the coast.
False fires, that others may be lost.

To the Lady Fleming.

But hushed be every thought that springs
From out the bitterness of things.

Elegiac Stanzas. Addressed to Sir G. H. B.

his doctrine, which now is dispersed all the world over." History, sect. ii. book iv, paragraph 53.

...

What Heraclitus would not laugh, or what Democritus would not weep? For though they digged up his body, burned his bones, and drowned his ashes, yet the word of God and truth of his doctrine, with the fruit and success thereof, they could not burn. - Fox: Book of Martyrs, vol. i. p. 606 (edition, 1641).

"Some prophet of that day said, —

"The Avon to the Severn runs,

The Severn to the sea;

And Wickliffe's dust shall spread abroad

Wide as the waters be.'"

DANIEL WEBSTER: Address before the Sons of
New Hampshire, 1849.

These lines are similarly quoted by the Rev. John Cumming in the

"Voices of the Dead."

1 The pen wherewith thou dost so heavenly sing

Made of a quill from an angel's wing.

HENRY CONSTABLE: Sonnet. Whose noble praise

Deserves a quill pluckt from an angel's wing.

DOROTHY BERRY: Sonnet.

To the solid ground

Of Nature trusts the mind that builds for aye.
A Volant Tribe of Bards on Earth.

Soft is the music that would charm forever;
The flower of sweetest smell is shy and lowly.

Not Love, not War.

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,

Whose veil is unremoved

Till heart with heart in concord beats,

And the lover is beloved.

Type of the wise who soar but never roam,
True to the kindred points of heaven and home.

A Briton even in love should be
A subject, not a slave!

To a Skylark.

Ere with Cold Beads of Midnight Dew.

Scorn not the sonnet. Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart.1

And when a damp

Scorn not the Sonnet.

Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains, -alas! too few.

But he is risen, a later star of dawn.

Ibid.

A Morning Exercise.

Bright gem instinct with music, vocal spark.

When his veering gait

And every motion of his starry train

Seem governed by a strain

Of music, audible to him alone.

Ibid

The Triad

Alas! how little can a moment show

Of an eye where feeling plays
In ten thousand dewy rays:

A face o'er which a thousand shadows go!

Stern Winter loves a dirge-like sound.

The Triad

On the Power of Sound. xii.

The bosom-weight, your stubborn gift,
That no philosophy can lift.

Nature's old felicities.

Presentiments.

The Trosachs.

Myriads of daisies have shone forth in flower
Near the lark's nest, and in their natural hour
Have passed away; less happy than the one
That by the unwilling ploughshare died to prove
The tender charm of poetry and love.

Poems composed during a Tour in the Summer of 1833. xxxvii.

Small service is true service while it lasts.

Of humblest friends, bright creature! scorn not one:
The daisy, by the shadow that it casts,

Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun.

To a Child. Written in her Album.

Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source,
The rapt one, of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth:
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his lonely hearth.

Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg.

How fast has brother followed brother,

From sunshine to the sunless land!

Those old credulities, to Nature dear,

Shall they no longer bloom upon the stock
Of history?

Ibid.

Memorials of a Tour in Italy. iv.