Alfred Tennyson

There is a dale in Ida, lovelier / Than any in old Ionia, beautiful / With emerald slopes of sunny sward, that lean / Above the loud glenriver, which hath worn / A path thro' steepdown granite walls below / Mantled with flowering tendriltwine.

“ […] Thy sense is clogg’d with dull mortality; / They spirit fetter’d with the bond of clay: / Open thine eyes and see.”

Break, break, break, / At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! / But the tender grace of a day that is dead / Will never come back to me.

No branchy thicket shelter yields; / But blessed forms in whistling storms / Fly o'er waste fens and windy fields.

And long we gazed, but satiated at length / Came to the ruins. High-arch'd and ivy-claspt, / Of finest Gothic, lighter than a fire, / Thro' one wide chasm of time and frost they gave / The park, the crowd, the house; but all within / The sward was trim as any garden lawn: […]

And, after, feigning pique at what she call'd / The raillery, or grotesque, or false sublime— / Like one that wishes at a dance to change / The music—clapt her hands and cried for war, / Or some grand fight to kill and make an end: […]

I envy not in any moods / ⁠The captive void of noble rage, / ⁠The linnet born within the cage, / That never knew the summer woods: […]

We have but faith: we cannot know; / ⁠For knowledge is of things we see / ⁠And yet we trust it comes from thee, / A beam in darkness: let it grow.

The great Intelligences fair / That range above our mortal state, / In circle round the blessed gate, / Received and gave him welcome there.

Thy spirit ere our fatal loss / ⁠Did ever rise from high to higher; / ⁠As mounts the heavenward altar-fire, / As flies the lighter thro’ the gross.

Like her I go; I cannot stay; / I leave this mortal ark behind, / A weight of nerves without a mind, / And leave the cliffs, and haste away […]

But I should turn mine ears and hear / The moanings of the homeless sea, / ⁠The sound of streams that swift or slow / ⁠Draw down Æonian hills, and sow / The dust of continents to be; […]

No joy the blowing season gives, / ⁠The herald melodies of spring, / ⁠But in the songs I love to sing / A doubtful gleam of solace lives.

I do but sing because I must, / And pipe but as the linnets sing: / And unto one her note is gay, / ⁠For now her little ones have ranged; / ⁠And unto one her note is changed, / Because her brood is stol’n away.

He faced the spectres of the mind / And laid them: thus he came at length / To find a stronger faith his own; / And Power was with him in the night, / Which makes the darkness and the light, / And dwells not in the light alone, / But in the darkness and the cloud

If these brief lays, of Sorrow born, / ⁠Were taken to be such as closed / ⁠Grave doubts and answers here proposed, / Then these were such as men might scorn: […]

Wrapt in drifts of lurid smoke / On the misty river-tide.

[S]he to Almesbury / Fled all night long by glimmering waste and weald, / And heard the Spirits of the waste and weald / Moan as she fled, or thought she heard them moan: […]

On a sudden, many a voice along the street, / And heel against the pavement echoing, burst / Their drowze; […]

And in herself she moan’d, ‘Too late, too late!’ / Till in the cold wind that foreruns the morn, / A blot in heaven, the Raven, flying high, / Croak’d, […]

She found no rest, and ever fail'd to draw / The quiet night into her blood, but lay / Contemplating her own unworthiness; / And when the pale and bloodless east began / To quicken to the sun, arose, […]