Epipsychidion

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Shelley Society, 1887 - 66 pages
 

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Page 8 - All that is insupportable in thee Of light, and love, and immortality! Sweet Benediction in the eternal Curse ! Veiled Glory of this lampless Universe! Thou Moon beyond the clouds ! Thou living Form Among the Dead! Thou Star above the Storm! Thou Wonder, and thou Beauty, and thou Terror! Thou Harmony of Nature's art! Thou Mirror In whom, as in the splendour of the Sun, All shapes look glorious which thou gazest on!
Page xxxvi - One hope within two wills, one will beneath Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death, One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality, And one annihilation. Woe is me! The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the height of Love's rare Universe, Are chains of lead around its flight of fire. — I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire! Weak Verses, go, kneel at your Sovereign's feet, And say : — 'We are the masters of thy slave; 'What wouldest thou with us and ours and thine?
Page lviii - Midst others of less note, came one frail Form, A phantom among men; companionless As the last cloud of an expiring storm Whose thunder is its knell; he, as I guess, Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness, Actaeon-like, and now he fled astray With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, And his own thoughts, along that rugged way, Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.
Page lviii - Is it not broken? On the withering flower The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.
Page lviii - A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift — A Love in desolation masked ; — a Power Girt round with weakness ; — it can scarce uplift The weight of the superincumbent hour...
Page 28 - The future from its cradle, and the past Out of its grave, and make the present last In thoughts and joys which sleep but cannot die, Folded within their own eternity. Our simple life wants little, and true taste Hires not the pale drudge Luxury to waste The scene it would adorn ; and therefore still Nature with all her children haunts the hill.
Page xlvi - If we reason we would be understood; if we imagine we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own ; that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood: — this is Love.
Page 13 - We — are we not formed, as notes of music are, For one another, though dissimilar? Such difference without discord as can make Those sweetest sounds in which all spirits shake, As trembling leaves in a continuous air.
Page 23 - Emily, A ship is floating in the harbour now, A wind is hovering o'er the mountain's brow , There is a path on the sea's azure floor, No keel has ever ploughed that path before...
Page 30 - As mountain-springs under the morning sun. We shall become the same, we shall be one Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two ? One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew, Till like two meteors of expanding flame...

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