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

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Page 77 - The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colors 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 33 - 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 xix - ... nor pair, nor build, nor sing. Yet well I ken the banks where Amaranths blow, Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow. Bloom, O ye Amaranths ! bloom for whom ye may, For me ye bloom not ! Glide, rich streams, away ! With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll : And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul ? WORK WITHOUT HOPE draws nectar in a sieve, And HOPE without an object cannot live.
Page 7 - I learnt from him that poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own as severe as that of science, and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes.
Page 15 - My shaping spirit of Imagination. 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 19 - 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 229 - Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart ; And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope ; And hope that scarce would know itself from fear ; Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, And genius given, and knowledge won in vain...
Page 327 - But our ideas being nothing but actual perceptions in the mind, which cease to be any thing when there is no perception of them, this laying up of our ideas in the repository of the memory signifies no more but this, that the mind has a power in many cases to revive perceptions which it has once had, with this additional perception annexed to them, that it has had them before.
Page 81 - The Fancy brings together images which have no connection natural or moral, but are yoked together by the poet by means of some accidental coincidence...
Page 7 - English compositions (at least for the last three years of our school education), he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words. Lute, harp, and lyre; Muse, Muses, and inspirations ; Pegasus, Parnassus, and Hippocrene were all an abomination to him.

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