A Treasury of English Sonnets

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David M. Main
A. Ireland and Company, 1880 - 470 pages
 

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Page 52 - Love's not Time's Fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come ; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
Page 36 - The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem For that sweet odour which doth in it live. The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye As the perfumed tincture of the roses...
Page 34 - Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy; Anon permit the basest clouds to ride With ugly rack on his celestial face, And from the forlorn world his visage hide, Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.
Page 51 - O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds. Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.
Page 33 - When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's •waste...
Page 142 - If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee; A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable!
Page 27 - come let us kiss and part, — Nay I have done, you get no more of me; And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart, That thus so cleanly I myself can free...
Page 46 - They that have power to hurt, and will do none, That do not do the thing they most do show, Who, moving others , are themselves as stone , Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow ; They rightly do inherit heaven's graces, And husband nature's riches from expense ; They are the lords and owners of their faces , Others but stewards of their excellence. The summer's flower is to the summer sweet, Though to itself it only live and die...
Page 72 - How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year! My hasting days fly on with full career, But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.
Page 289 - O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence : live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end with self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge men's search To vaster issues.

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