A Handbook of English Literature

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William Hall Griffin
C. Lockwood and son, 1897 - Literary Criticism - 384 pages

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Page 117 - Peace to all such! but were there one whose fires True genius kindles, and fair fame inspires ; Blest with each talent and each art to please, And born to write, converse, and live with ease: Should such a man, too fond to rule alone, Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne...
Page 294 - The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, Burn'd on the water : the poop was beaten gold ; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them ; the oars were silver, Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke and made The water which they beat to follow faster, As amorous of their strokes.
Page 88 - To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong, Within doors, or without, still as a fool, In power of others, never in my own ; Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half. O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse Without all hope of day! O first created beam, and thou great Word, Let there be light, and light was over all; Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree?
Page 179 - BRIGHT star ! would I were steadfast as thou art— Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night. And watching, with eternal lids apart. Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores...
Page 149 - Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such, We scarcely can praise it, or blame it too much; Who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.
Page 352 - Rossetti. - A SHADOW OF DANTE : being an Essay towards studying Himself, his World and his Pilgrimage.
Page 163 - As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in luve am I, And I will luve thee still, my dear, Till a' the seas gang dry. Till a" the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt wi
Page 169 - Lyrical Ballads, in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic — yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief, for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
Page 224 - He saw thro' life and death, thro' good and ill, He saw thro' his own soul. The marvel of the everlasting will, An open scroll, Before him lay : with echoing feet he threaded The...
Page 295 - So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes, And made their bends adornings ; at the helm A seeming mermaid steers ; the silken tackle Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands, That yarely frame the office. From the barge A strange invisible perfume hits the sense Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast Her people out upon her, and Antony, Enthron'd i...

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