Inspirational

Is there a power that can sustain and cheer
The captive chieftain, by a tyrant's doom,
Forced to descend into his destined tomb
A dungeon dark! where he must waste the year,
And lie cut off from all his heart holds dear;
What time his injured country is a stage
Whereon deliberate Valour and the rage
Of righteous Vengeance side by side appear,
Filling from morn to night the heroic scene
With deeds of hope and everlasting praise:
Say can he think of this with mind serene
And silent fetters? Yes, if visions bright
Shine on his soul, reflected from the days
When he himself was tried in open light.

Ah, not for us the Heavens that hold
GOD'S message of Promethean fire!
The Flame that fell on bards of old
To hallow and inspire.

Yet let the Soul dream on and dare
No less SONG'S height that these possess:
We can but fail; and may prepare
The way to some success.

It will not be these beauties of vignettes,
Poor products of a worthless century,
Feet in half-boots, fingers in castanets,
Who satisfy the yearning heart in me.

That poet of chlorosis, Gavarni,
Can keep his twittering troupe of sickly queens,
Since these pale roses do not let me see
My red ideal, the tlower of my dreams.

I need a heart abyssal in its depth,
A soul confirmed in crime, Lady Macbeth,
Aeschylus' dream, storm-born out of the south,

Or you, great Night of Michelangelo's,
Who calmly twist in an exotic pose
Those charms he fashioned for a Titan's mouth.

Here, in the heart of the world,
    Here, in the noise and the din,
Here, where our spirits were hurled
    To battle with sorrow and sin,
This is the place and the spot
    For knowledge of infinite things;
This is the kingdom where Thought
    Can conquer the prowess of kings.

Wait for no heavenly life,
    Seek for no temple alone;
Here, in the midst of the strife,
    Know what the sages have known.
See what the Perfect Ones saw -
    God in the depth of each soul,
God as the light and the law,
    God as beginning and goal.

Earth is one chamber of Heaven,
    Death is no grander than birth.
Joy in the life that was given,
    Strive for perfection on earth.
Here, in the turmoil and roar,
    Show what it is to be calm...

Sweet empty sky of June without a stain,
    Faint, gray-blue dewy mists on far-off hills,
Warm, yellow sunlight flooding mead and plain,
    That each dark copse and hollow overfills;
    The rippling laugh of unseen, rain-fed rills,
Weeds delicate-flowered, white and pink and gold,
A murmur and a singing manifold.


The gray, austere old earth renews her youth
    With dew-lines, sunshine, gossamer, and haze.
How still she lies and dreams, and veils the truth,
    While all is fresh as in the early days!
    What simple things be these the soul to raise
To bounding joy, and make young pulses beat,
With nameless pleasure finding life so sweet.


On such a golden morning forth there floats,
    Between the soft earth and the softer sky,
In ...

- Carmina possumus
Donare, et pretium dicere muneri.
Non incisa notis marmora publicis,
Per quae spiritus et vita redit bonis
Post mortem ducibus
- clarius indicant
Laudes, quam - Pierides; neque,
Si chartae sileant quod bene feceris,
Mercedem tuleris. HOR. Car. 8, Lib. 4.

I

When the soft hand of sleep had closed the latch
On the tired household of corporeal sense,
And Fancy, keeping unreluctant watch,
Was free her choicest favours to dispense;
I saw, in wondrous perspective displayed,
A landscape more august than happiest skill
Of pencil ever clothed with light and shade;
An intermingled pomp of vale and hill,
City, and naval stream, suburban grove,
And stately forest where the wild deer rove;
Nor wanted lurking hamlet, dusky t...

Filled is Life's goblet to the brim;
And though my eyes with tears are dim,
I see its sparkling bubbles swim,
And chant a melancholy hymn
    With solemn voice and slow.

No purple flowers,--no garlands green,
Conceal the goblet's shade or sheen,
Nor maddening draughts of Hippocrene,
Like gleams of sunshine, flash between
    Thick leaves of mistletoe.

This goblet, wrought with curious art,
Is filled with waters, that upstart,
When the deep fountains of the heart,
By strong convulsions rent apart,
    Are running all to waste.

And as it mantling passes round,
With fennel is it wreathed and crowned,
Whose seed and foliage sun-imbrowned
Are in its waters steeped and drowned,
    And give a bitter taste.

Above the lowly ...

I have gone sometimes by the gates of Death
And stood beside the cavern through whose doors
Enter the voyagers into the unseen.
From that dread threshold only, gazing back,
Have eyes in swift illumination seen
Life utterly revealed, and guessed therein
What things were vital and what things were vain.
Know then, like a vast ocean from my feet
Spreading away into the morning sky,
I saw unrolled my vanished days, and, lo,
Oblivion like a morning mist obscured
Toils, trials, ambitions, agitations, ease,
And like green isles, sun-kissed, with sweet perfume
Loading the airs blown back from that dim gulf,
Gleamed only through the all-involving haze
The hours when we have loved and been beloved.

Therefore, sweet friends, as often as by Love
You rise absorb...

They tell us that the Muse is soon to fly hence,
Leaving the bowers of song that once were dear,
Her robes bequeathing to her sister, Science,
The groves of Pindus for the axe to clear.

Optics will claim the wandering eye of fancy,
Physics will grasp imagination's wings,
Plain fact exorcise fiction's necromancy,
The workshop hammer where the minstrel sings,

No more with laugher at Thalia's frolics
Our eyes shall twinkle till the tears run down,
But in her place the lecturer on hydraulics
Spout forth his watery science to the town.

No more our foolish passions and affections
The tragic Muse with mimic grief shall try,
But, nobler far, a course of vivisections
Teach what it costs a tortured brute to die.

The unearthed monad, long in burie...

"Her divine skill taught me this,
That from every thing I saw
I could some instruction draw,
And raise pleasure to the height
Through the meanest objects sight.
By the murmur of a spring,
Or the least bough's rustelling;
By a Daisy whose leaves spread
Shut when Titan goes to bed;
Or a shady bush or tree;
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature's beauties can
In some other wiser man.'
    G. Wither.

    
    
In youth from rock to rock I went,
From hill to hill in discontent
Of pleasure high and turbulent,
Most pleased when most uneasy;
But now my own delights I make,
My thirst at every rill can slake,
And gladly Nature's love partake,
Of Thee, sweet Daisy!

Thee Winter in the garland wears
That thinly...

I rose up as my custom is
    On the eve of All-Souls' day,
And left my grave for an hour or so
To call on those I used to know
    Before I passed away.

I visited my former Love
    As she lay by her husband's side;
I asked her if life pleased her, now
She was rid of a poet wrung in brow,
    And crazed with the ills he eyed;

Who used to drag her here and there
    Wherever his fancies led,
And point out pale phantasmal things,
And talk of vain vague purposings
    That she discredited.

She was quite civil, and replied,
    "Old comrade, is that you?
Well, on the whole, I like my life. -
I know I swore I'd be no wife,
    But what was I to do?

"You see, of all men for my sex
    A poet is the worst;
Women ...

We are what suns and winds and waters make us;
The mountains are our sponsors, and the rills
Fashion and win their nursling with their smiles.
But where the land is dim from tyranny,
There tiny pleasures occupy the place
Of glories and of duties; as the feet
Of fabled faeries when the sun goes down
Trip o’er the grass where wrestlers strove by day.
Then Justice, call’d the Eternal One above,
Is more inconstant than the buoyant form
That burst into existence from the froth
Of ever-varying ocean: what is best
Then becomes worst; what loveliest, most deform’d.
The heart is hardest in the softest climes,
The passions flourish, the affections die.
O thou vast tablet of these awful truths,
That fillest all the space between the seas,
Spreading from Venice’s des...

1. Vast oceanic movements, the flux and reflux of immeasurable tides, oversweep our continent.

2. From the far Caucasian steppes, from the squalid Ghettos of Europe,

3. From Odessa and Bucharest, from Kief, and Ekaterinoslav,

4. Hark to the cry of the exiles of Babylon, the voice of Rachel mourning for her children, of Israel lamenting for Zion.

5. And lo, like a turbid stream, the long-pent flood bursts the dykes of oppression and rushes hitherward.

6. Unto her ample breast, the generous mother of nations welcomes them.

7. The herdsman of Canaan and the seed of Jerusalem's royal shepherd renew their youth amid the pastoral plains of Texas and the golden valleys of the Sierras.

There is a power whose inspiration fills
Nature's fair fabric, sun- and star-inwrought,
Like airy dew ere any drop distils,
Like perfume in the laden flower, like aught
Unseen which interfused throughout the whole
Becomes its quickening pulse and principle and soul.
Now when, the drift of old desire renewing,
Warm tides flow northward over valley and field,
When half-forgotten sound and scent are wooing
From their deep-chambered recesses long sealed
Such memories as breathe once more
Of childhood and the happy hues it wore,
Now, with a fervor that has never been
In years gone by, it stirs me to respond, -
Not as a force whose fountains are within
The faculties of the percipient mind,
Subject with them to darkness and decay,
But something absolute, somethi...

A vision beauteous as the morn,
    With heavenly eyes and tresses streaming,
Slow glided o'er a field late shorn
    Where walked a poet idly dreaming.
He saw her, and joy lit his face,
    "Oh, vanish not at human speaking,"
He cried, "thou form of magic grace,
    Thou art the poem I am seeking.

"I've sought thee long!    I claim thee now -
    My thought embodied, living, real."
She shook the tresses from her brow.
    "Nay, nay!" she said, "I am ideal.
I am the phantom of desire -
    The spirit of all great endeavour,
I am the voice that says, 'Come higher,'
    That calls men up and up for ever.

"'Tis not alone thy thought supreme
    That here upon thy path has risen;
I am the artist's highest dream,
    The ray of light he c...

Life's chalice is empty--pour in! pour in!
What?--Pour in Strength!
Strength for the struggle through good and ill;
Through good--that the soul may be upright still,
Unspoil'd by riches, unswerving in will,
To walk by the light of unvarnish'd truth,
Up the flower-border'd path of youth;--
Through ill--that the soul may stoutly hold
Its faith, its freedom through hunger and cold,
Steadfast and pure as the true men of old.
Strength for the sunshine, strength for the gloom,
Strength for the conflict, strength for the tomb;
Let not the heart feel a craven fear--
Draw from the fountain deep and clear;
Brim up Life's chalice--pour in! pour in!
Pour in Strength!

Life's chalice is empty--pour in! pour in!
What--Pour in Truth!
Drink! till the mists that...

A life more bright than the sun's face, bowed
Through stress of season and coil of cloud,
Sets: and the sorrow that casts out fear
Scarce deems him dead in his chill still shroud,
Dead on the breast of the dying year,
Poet and painter and friend, thrice dear
For love of the suns long set, for love
Of song that sets not with sunset here,
For love of the fervent heart, above
Their sense who saw not the swift light move
That filled with sense of the loud sun's lyre
The thoughts that passion was fain to prove
In fervent labour of high desire
And faith that leapt from its own quenched pyre
Alive and strong as the sun, and caught
From darkness light, and from twilight fire.
Passion, deep as the depths unsought
Whence faith's own hope may redeem us nought,
...

In those good days when we were young and wise,
You spake to music, you with the thoughtful eyes,
And God looked down from heaven, pleased to hear
A young man's song arise so firm and clear.
Has Fancy died? The Morning Star gone cold?
Why are you silent? Have we grown so old?
Must I alone keep playing? Will not you,
Lord of the Measures, string your lyre anew?
Lover of Greece, is this the richest store
You bring us,--withered leaves and dusty lore,
And broken vases widowed of their wine,
To brand you pedant while you stand divine?
Decorous words beseem the learned lip,
But Poets have the nicer scholarship.

In English glades they watch the Cyprian glow,
And all the Maenad melodies they know.
They hear strange voices in a London street,
And track the ...