University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, Issue 17

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The University, 1922 - Language and languages - 284 pages
 

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Page 99 - Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake, To perish never; Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, Nor Man nor Boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Page 87 - I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms were then to me An appetite ; a feeling and a love That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any interest Unborrowed from the eye.
Page 142 - How exquisitely the individual Mind (And the progressive powers perhaps no less Of the whole species) to the external World Is fitted : — and how exquisitely, too — Theme this but little heard of among men — The external World is fitted to the Mind; And the creation (by no lower name Can it be called) which they with blended might Accomplish: — this is our high argument.
Page 77 - I love the brooks which down their channels fret Even more than when I tripp'd lightly as they ; The innocent brightness of a new-born day Is lovely yet ; The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality ; Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Page 75 - But now afflictions bow me down to earth: Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth ; But oh! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, My shaping spirit of Imagination.
Page 50 - The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse...
Page 57 - Humble and rustic life was generally chosen because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language...
Page 128 - To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower, Even the loose stones that cover the high-way, I gave a moral life : I saw them feel, Or linked them to some feeling : the great mass Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all That I beheld respired with inward meaning.
Page 134 - Ah! then, if mine had been the Painter's hand, To express what then I saw; and add the gleam The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the Poet's dream; I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile! Amid a world how different from this!
Page 161 - I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity : the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of re-action, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

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