Phases of Thought and Criticism

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Houghton, Mifflin, 1892 - 273 pages
 

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Page 253 - I falter where I firmly trod, And falling with my weight of cares Upon the great world's altar-stairs That slope thro' darkness up to God, I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope.
Page 156 - At bottom, it turns still on power of intellect; it is a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a Poet. See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it.
Page 236 - Nor thro' the questions men may try, The petty cobwebs we have spun: If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep, I heard a voice "believe no more" And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep; A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer'd "I have felt.
Page 203 - Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they.
Page 200 - My own hope is, a sun will pierce The thickest cloud earth ever stretched ; That, after Last, returns the First, Though a wide compass round be fetched ; That what began best, can't end worst, Nor what God blessed once, prove accurst.
Page 224 - And more, my son! for more than once when I Sat all alone, revolving in myself The word that is the symbol of myself, The mortal limit of the Self was loosed, And past into the Nameless, as a cloud Melts into Heaven. I touch'd my limbs, the limbs Were strange not mine — and yet no shade of doubt, But utter clearness, and thro...
Page 259 - Were it not for this voice, speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist or a pantheist or a polytheist when I looked into the world.
Page 200 - Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last — far off — at last, to all, And every winter change to spring.
Page 207 - I HELD it truth, with him who sings To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things.
Page 260 - I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence. . . . I argue about the world; -if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity.

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