Francis Thompson Quotes
All things by immortal power. Near or far, to each other linked are, that thou canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star.
The chambers in the house of dreams
Are fed with so divine an air, That
Time's hoary wings grow young therein,
And they who walk there are most fair.
The angels keep their ancient places; --
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
It's you, it's your estranged faces,
That miss the many-splendored thing.
Oh, but the heavenly grammar did I hold
Of that high speech which angels' tongues turn gold!
So should her deathless beauty take no wrong,
Praised in her own great kindred's fit and cognate tongue.
Or if that language yet with us abode
Which Adam in the garden talked with God!
But our untempered speech descends--poor heirs!
Grimy and rough-cast still from Babel's brick layers:
Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit,
Strong but to damn, not memorise, a spirit!
A cheek, a lip, a limb, a bosom, they
Move with light ease in speech of working-day;
And women we do use to praise even so.
Her soul from earth to Heaven lies,
Like the ladder of the vision,
Wheron go
To and fro
In ascension and demission,
Star-flecked feet of Paradise.
Swift, swift, and bring with you
Song's Indian summer!
The fairest things have fleetest end:
Their scent survives their close,
But the rose's scent is bitterness
To him that loved the rose!
There is no expeditious road
To pack and label men for God,
And save them by the barrel-load.
Some may perchance, with strange surprise,
Have blundered into Paradise.
Nothing begins, and nothing ends,
That is not paid with moan;
For we are born in others' pain,
And perish in our own.
Like to a wind-blown sapling grow I from
The cliff, Sweet, of your skyward-jetting soul,--
Shook by all gusts that sweep it, overcome
By all its clouds incumbent; O be true
To your soul, dearest, as my life to you!
For if that soil grew sterile, then the whole
Of me must shrivel, from the topmost shoot
Of climbing poesy, and my life, killed through,
Dry down and perish to the foodless root.