Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1807-1882 Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! For the soul is dead that slumbers, And things are not what they seem. Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was…
William Wordsworth, 1770-1850 The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that…
by Ernest Dowson Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long. –Horace They are not long, the weeping and the laughter, Love and desire and hate: I think they have no portion in us after We pass the…
by Alfred Lord Tennyson I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally, And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley. By thirty hills I hurry down, Or slip between the ridges, By twenty thorps, a little town, And half a hundred bridges.…
by Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1842 Part I On either side the river lie Long fields of barley and of rye, That clothe the wold and meet the sky; And through the field the road runs by To many-towered Camelot; And up and down the people go, Gazing where the lilies…
by Robert Southey, 1802 No stir in the air, no stir in the sea, The ship was still as she could be, Her sails from heaven received no motion, Her keel was steady in the ocean. Without either sign or sound of their shock The waves flow’d over the Inchcape…
by A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson, 1890 There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around That the colt from old Regret had got away, And had joined the wild bush horses – he was worth a thousand pound, So all the cracks had gathered to the fray.…