'Twas strange that one so young should thus concern His brain about the action of the sky; If you think 'twas philosophy that this did, I can't help thinking puberty assisted.
The lapse of ages changes all things - time, language, the earth, the bounds of the sea, the stars of the sky, and every thing about, around, and underneath man, except man himself.
I live, but live to die: and, living, see nothing to make death hateful, save an innate clinging, a loathsome and yet all invincible instinct of life, which I abhor, as I despise myself,
yet cannot overcome — and so I live. Would I had never lived!
Many are poets, but without the name;For what is Poesy but to createFrom overfeeling Good or Ill; and aimAt an external life beyond our fate,And be the new Prometheus of new men,Bestowing fire from Heaven, and then, too late,Finding the pleasure given repaid with pain
Yet still there whispers the small voice within, Heard through Gain's silence, and o'er Glory's din; Whatever creed be taught or land be trod, Man's conscience is the oracle of God.
Bread has been made (indifferent) from potatoes;
And galvanism has set some corpses grinning,
But has not answer'd like the apparatus
Of the Humane Society's beginning,
By which men are unsuffocated gratis:
What wondrous new machines have late been spinning.
The stars are forth, the moon above the tops Of the snow-shining mountains--beautiful! I linger yet with nature, for the night Hath been to me a more familiar face Than that of man, and in her starry shade Of dim and solitary loveliness I learned the language of another world.
And the small ripple spilt upon the beach Scarcely o'erpass'd the cream of your champagne, When o'er the brim the sparkling bumpers reach, That spring-dew of the spirit! the heart's rain! Few things surpass old wine; and they may preach Who please,—the more because they preach in vain,— Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda-water the day after.
But every fool describes, in these bright days, His wondrous journey to some foreign court, And spawns his quarto, and demands your praise,-- Death to his publisher, to him 'tis sport.
Our life is two fold Sleep hath its own world, A boundary between the things misnamed Death and existence Sleep hath its own world, And a wide realm of wild reality.