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

Swinburne

A little soul scarce fledged for earth

Takes wing with heaven again for goal,

Even while we hailed as fresh from birth

A little soul.

Ah, thy beautiful hair! so was it once braided for me, for me;

Now for death is it crowned, only for death, lover and lord of thee.

All gifts but one the jealous God may keep

From our soul’s longing, one he cannot—sleep.

This, though he grudge all other grace to prayer,

This grace his closed hand cannot choose but spare.

For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother,

Take at my hands this garland and farewell.

Thin is the leaf, and chill the wintry smell,

And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother.

In this world of dreams, I have chosen my part.

To sleep for a season and hear no word

Of true love’s truth or of light love’s art,

Only the song of a secret bird.

Nay, then, what flames are these that leap and swell

As ’twere to show, where earth’s foundations crack,

The secrets of the sepulchres of hell

On Dante’s track?

O tender time that love thinks long to see,

Sweet foot of Spring that with her foot-fall sows

Late snow-like flowery leavings of the snows,

Be not too long irresolute to be;

O mother-month, where have they hidden thee?

They say sin touches not a man so near

As shame a woman; yet he too should be

Part of the penance, being more deep than she

Set in the sin.

Time, thy name is sorrow, says the stricken

Heart of life, laid waste with wasting flame

Ere the change of things and thoughts requicken,

Time, thy name.

The sun is all about the world we see, the breath and strength of every spring.

There are few delights in any life so high and rare as the subtle and strong delight of sovereign art and poetry; there are none more pure and more sublime. To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.

Time stoops to no man’s lure.

To have read the greatest works any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.

When fate has allowed to any man more than one great gift, accident or necessity seems usually to contrive that one shall encumber and impede the other.

Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD