I never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend, To cold oblivion.
Let me set my mournful ditty To a merry measure; Thou wilt never come for pity, Thou wilt come for pleasure; Pity then will cut away Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.
He wanders, like a day-appearing dream, Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.
We look before and after, And pine for what is not; Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep - he hath awakened from the dream of life - 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife.
One word is too often profaned For me to profane it, One feeling too falsely disdain'd For thee to disdain it. One hope too like dispair For prudence to smother, I can give not what men call love: But wilt thou accept not The worship the heart lifts above And heaven rejects not: The desire of the moth for the star, The devotion of something afar From the sphere of our sorrow?
Religion pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check.
Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.