Biographia Literaria, Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions

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G. P. Putnam, 1848 - Criticism - 804 pages

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Page 166 - Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read. And tongues to be your being shall rehearse When all the breathers of this world are dead. You still shall live — such virtue hath my pen — Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
Page 151 - For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient, all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural man — This was my sole resource, my only plan : Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.
Page 202 - For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all. I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion : the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborrowed from the eye.
Page 376 - The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.
Page 376 - I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it Struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
Page 169 - Or man, or woman. Yet I argue not Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer Right onward.
Page 155 - Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows While proudly riding o'er the azure realm In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes; Youth on the prow, and pleasure at the helm; Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway, That, hush'd in grim repose, expects his evening prey.
Page 376 - The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space...
Page 204 - It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought ; the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed ; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations...
Page 172 - O'er the dark trees a yellower verdure shed, And tip with silver every mountain's head ; Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise, A flood of glory bursts from all the skies : The conscious swains, rejoicing in the sight, Eye the blue vault, and bless the useful light.

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