C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Keats

A thing of beauty is a joy forever;

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

And on the balmy zephyrs tranquil rest

The silver clouds.

And shade the violets,

That they may bind the moss in leafy nets.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

But the rose leaves herself upon the brier

For winds to kiss and grateful bees to feed.

E’en like the passage of an angel’s tear

That falls through the clear ether silently.

Even bees, the little alms-men of spring bowers,

Know there is richest juice in poison-flowers.

Ever let the Fancy roam,

Pleasure never is at home.

Four seasons fill the measure of the year;

There are four seasons in the mind of man;

He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear

Takes in all beauty with an easy span;

He has his Summer, when luxuriously

Spring’s honey’d-cud of youthful thought he loves

To ruminate, and by such dreaming high

Is nearest unto heaven; quiet coves

His soul hath in its Autumn, when his wings

He furleth close; contented so to look

On mists in idleness—to let fair things

Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.

He has his Winter, too, of pale misfeature,

Or else he would forego his mortal nature.

Hear ye not the hum

Of mighty workings?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but more endear’d,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

How beautiful, if sorrow had not made

Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self.

I came to feel how far above

All fancy, pride, and fickle maidenhood,

All earthly pleasure, all imagined good,

Was the warm tremble of a devout kiss.

In a drear-nighted December,

Too happy, happy brook,

Thy bubblings ne’er remember

Apollo’s summer look;

But with a sweet forgetting,

They stay their crystal fretting,

Never, never petting

About the frozen time.

In the long vista of the years to roll,

Let me not see my country’s honor fade;

Oh! let me see our land retain its soul!

Her pride in Freedom, and not Freedom’s shade.

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been,

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

O magic sleep! O comfortable bird

That broodest o’er the troubled sea of the mind

Till it is hush’d and smooth!

O soft embalmer of the still midnight!

Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,

Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light,

Enshaded in forgetfulness divine.

O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,

Let it not be among the jumbled heap

Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,—

Nature’s observatory—whence the dell,

In flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell,

May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep

’Mongst boughs pavilion’d, where the deer’s swift leap

Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell.

On a lone winter evening, when the frost

Has wrought a silence.

Roses, and pinks, and violets, to adorn

The shrine of Flora in her early May.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core.

Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose,

Flushing his brow.

Sweet are the pleasures that to verse belong,

And doubly sweet a brotherhood in song.

Those green-robed senators of mighty woods,

Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,

Dream, and so dream all night without a stir.

Thy thunder, conscious of the new command,

Rumbles reluctant o’er our fallen house.

’Tis the eternal law,

That first in beauty should be first in might.

To one who has been long in city pent,

’Tis very sweet to look into the fair

And open face of heaven,—to breathe a prayer

Full in the smile of the blue firmament.

Underneath large blue-bells tented

Where the daisies are rose-scented,

And the rose herself has got

Perfume which on earth is not.

Where soil is, men grow,

Whether to weeds or flowers.

A moment’s thought is passion’s passing knell.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever; its loveliness increases! it will never pass into nothingness.

Albeit failure in any cause produces a correspondent misery in the soul, yet it is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterward carefully eschew.

And share the inward fragrance of each other’s heart.

Death is Life’s high meed.

Ever let the fancy roam; pleasure never is at home.

He knew whose gentle hand was on the latch, before the door had given her to his eyes.

Hear we not the hum of mighty workings?

I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem, and to be given away by a Novel.

I long to believe in immortality.***If I am destined to be happy with you here—how short is the longest life. I wish to believe in immortality—I wish to live with you forever.

Let me have music dying, and I seek no more delight.

Mild May’s eldest child, the coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Music’s golden tongue.

Noiseless as fear in a wide wilderness.

Silken, chaste, and hushed.

That queen of secrecy, the violet.

The genius of Shakespeare was an innate university.

The poetry of earth is never dead.

The thought, the deadly feel, of solitude.

There is not a fiercer hell than failure in a great object.

Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, dream, and so dream, all night without a stir.

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