Alfred, Lord Tennyson Quotes

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Is there evil but on earth? Or pain in every peopled sphere?
Well, be grateful for the sounding watchword "Evolution" here.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Full many a love in loving youth was mine;
I needed then no charm to keep them mine.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
A classic lecture, rich in sentiment,
With scraps of thundrous epic lilted out
By violet-hooded Doctors, elegies
And quoted odes, and jewels five-words-long,
That on the stretched forefinger of all Time
Sparkle for ever.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
And when they buried him the little port
Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
What hope is here for modern rhyme
To him, who turns a musing eye
On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie
Foreshorten'd in the tract of time?

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
And Thought leap'd out to wed with Thought Ere Thought could wed itself with Speech.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
A young man will be wiser by and by;
An old man's wit may wander ere he die.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
From the bank and from the river
He flashed into the crystal mirror,
"Tirra lirra," by the river
Sang Sir Lancelot.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,
And friend slew friend not knowing whom he slew;

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Ring out the grief that saps the mind, for those that were here we see no more.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Some sense of duty, something of a faith,
Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made, Some patient force to change them when we will, Some civic manhood firm against the crowd.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
And slowly answer'd Arthur from the barge:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new;
And God fulfills himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Man…
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law—
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrieked against his creed.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
So all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the winter sea.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
What is it all but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns?

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
In the end I accepted the honour, because during dinner Venables told me, that, if I became Poet Laureate, I should always when I dined out be offered the liver-wing of a fowl.
On being made Poet Laureate in 1850

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore Than labor in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The city is built To music, therefore never built at all, And therefore built forever.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower — but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Life is not as idle ore,
But iron dug from central gloom,
And heated hot with burning fears,
And dipt in baths of hissing tears,
And batter'd with the shocks of doom,
To shape and use.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Landscape-lover, lord of language
more than he that sang the Works and Days,
All the chosen coin of fancy
flashing out from many a golden phrase.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The bodies and the bones of those
That strove in other days to pass,
Are wither'd in the thorny close,
Or scatter'd blanching on the grass.
He gazes on the silent dead:
"They perish'd in their daring deeds."
This proverb flashes thro' his head,
"The many fail: the one succeeds."

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Have I not found a happy earth?
I least should breathe a thought of pain.
Would God renew me from my birth
I'd almost live my life again.
So sweet it seems with thee to walk,
And once again to woo thee mine —
It seems in after-dinner talk
Across the walnuts and the wine —

Alfred, Lord Tennyson