If the great Captain of Plymouth is so very eager to wed me, Why does he not come himself, and take the trouble to woo me? If I am not worth the wooing, I surely am not worth the winning!
I saw the long line of the vacant shore, The sea-weed and the shells upon the sand, And the brown rocks left bare on every hand, As if the ebbing tide would flow no more.
The spirit-world around this world of sense
Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere
Wafts through these earthly mists and vapours dense
A vital breath of more ethereal air.
Love is the root of creation; God's essence; worlds without number Lie in his bosom like children; he made them for this purpose only. Only to love and to be loved again.
More and more do I feel, as I advance in life, how little we really know of each other. Friendship seems to me like the touch of musical-glasses--it is only contact; but the glasses themselves, and their contents, remain quite distinct and unmingled.
Time rides with the old
At a great pace. As travellers on swift steeds
See the near landscape fly and flow behind them,
While the remoter fields and dim horizons
Go with them, and seem wheeling round to meet them,
So in old age things near us slip away,
And distant things go with us.
Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.