Alfred, Lord Tennyson Quotes

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A pasty costly-made, Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay, Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks Imbedded and injellied.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
If I make dark my countenance, I shut my life from happier chance.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Dead sounds at night come from the inmost hills. Like footsteps upon wool.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
This truth within thy mind rehearse, That in a boundless universe Is boundless better, boundless worse.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Tis not your work, but Love's. Love, unperceived, A more ideal Artist he than all, Came, drew your pencil from you, made those eyes Darker than the darkest pansies, and that hair More black than ashbuds in the front of March.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
When Science reaches forth her arms To feel from world to world, and charms Her secret from the latest moon?

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Had the fierce ashes of some fiery Peak Been hurled so high they ranged round the World, For day by day through many a blood-red eve The wrathful sunset glared.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
As nine months go to the shaping an infant ripe for his birth, So many a million of ages have gone to the making of man.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Sweet were the days when I was all unknown, But when my name was lifted up, the storm Brake on the mountain and I cared not for it. Right well know I that fame is half disfame.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
All precious things, discover'd late, To those that seek them issue forth, For love in sequel works with fate, And draws the veil from hidden worth.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
I wind about, and in and out, - With here a blossom sailing, - And here and there a lusty trout, - And here and there a grayling...

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
A still salt pool, locked in with bars of sand, Left on the shore; that hears all night The plunging seas draw backward from the land Their moon-led waters white.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Shall eagles not be eagles? wrens be wrens? If all the world were falcons, what of that? The wonder of the eagle were the less, But he not less the eagle.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
What is it? A learned man Could give it a clumsy name. Let him name it who can, The beauty would be the same.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
And by the meadow-trenches blow the faint sweet cuckoo-flowers.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
And out of darkness came the hands that reach through nature, moulding men.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Many a night I saw the Pleiads,
Rising thro' the mellow shade,
Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies,
Tangled in a silver braid.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
See what a lovely shell, Small and pure as pearl, Lying close to my foot, Frail, but a work divine, Made so fairly well, With delicate spire and whorl, How exquisitely minute, A miracle of design!

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
King am I, whatsoever be their cry;
And one last act of kinghood shalt thou see
Yet, ere I pass.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
I grow in worth, and wit, and sense,
Unboding critic-pen,
Or that eternal want of pence,
Which vexes public men,
Who hold their hands to all, and cry
For that which all deny them —
Who sweep the crossings, wet or dry,
And all the world go by them.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
For every worm beneath the moon
Draws different threads, and late and soon
Spins, toiling out his own cocoon.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
I don't think that since Shakespeare there has been such a master of the English language as I. But to be sure, I have nothing to say.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
I toil beneath the curse,
But, knowing not the universe,
I fear to slide from bad to worse.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
There beneath the Roman ruin where the purple flowers grow,
Came that 'Ave atque Vale' of the Poet's hopeless woe,
Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen-hundred years ago,
'Frater Ave atque Vale'—as we wander'd to and fro
Gazing at the Lydian laughter of the Garda Lake below
Sweet Catullus's all-but-island, olive-silvery Sirmio!

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Many an aeon moulded earth before her highest, man, was born, Many an aeon too may pass when earth is manless and forlorn, Earth so huge and yet so bounded — pools of salt and plots of land — Shallow skin of green and azure — chains of mountains, grains of sand!

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
And the homeless planet at length will be wheeled thro the silence of Space, Motherless evermore of an ever-vanishing race, When the worm shall have writhed its last and its last brother-worm will have fled From the dead fossil skull that is left in the rocks of an earth that is dead.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
I have led her home, my love, my only friend. There is none like her, none, And never yet so warmly ran my blood, And sweetly, on and on Calming itself to the long-wished for end, Full to the banks, close on the prom- ised good.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson