Beauty Is Truth

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede     Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed;     Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth Eternity: Cold Pastoral!     When old age shall this generation waste,         Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe     Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all         Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. -John Keats (1795-1821), Ode on a Grecian Urn

Verdurous Gloom

But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown     Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. -John Keats (1795-1821), Ode to a Nightingale

Summer Retreat

Or in my boat I lie Moored to the cool bank in the summer-heats,     'Mid wide grass meadows which the sunshine fills,     And watch the warm, green-muffled Cumner hills, And wonder if thou haunt'st their shy retreats. -Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), The Scholar-Gipsy

Winter Grief

Ah woe is me! Winter is come and gone,     But grief returns with the revolving year. The airs and streams renew their joyous tone; -Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), Adonais

North Wind

Come see the north wind's masonry. Out of an unseen quarry evermore Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer Curves his white bastions with projected roof Round every windward stake, or tree, or door. -Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), The Snow-Storm

Silver Shrine

Ah, silver shrine, here will I take my rest     After so many hours of toil and quest,     A famished pilgrim--saved by miracle.     Though I have found, I will not rob thy nest     Saving of thy sweet self; if thouh think'st well To trust, fair Madeline, to no rude infidel. -John Keats (1795-1821), The Eve of St. Agnes

Mind's Work

And when his hours are numbered, and the world Is all his own, retiring, as he were not, Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone, Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work, The frolic architecture of the snow. -Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), The Snow-Storm