Quotes from 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 understandWhat you are, root and all, and all in all,I should know what God and man is.

For I dipp'd into the future, far as human eye could see,Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dewFrom the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue.

Believing where we cannot prove.

Sunset and evening star,And one clear call for me!And may there be no moaning of the bar,When I put out to sea,But such a tide as moving seems asleep,Too full for sound and foam,When that which drew from out the boundless deepTurns again home.

With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter's heart.

And from his ashes may be madeThe violet of his native land.

But, for the unquiet heart and brainA use in measured language lies;The sad mechanic exercise,Like dull narcotics numbing pain.

Doänt thou marry for munny, but goä wheer munny is!

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

And out of darkness came the hands that reach thro' nature, moulding men.

And o'er the hills and far awayBeyond their utmost purple rim,Beyond the night, across the day,Through all the world she followed him.

He seems so near, and yet so far.

But what am I?An infant crying in the night:An infant crying for the light:And with no language but a cry.

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapp'd in universal law.

This is the truth the poet sings,That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.

She said, "I am aweary, aweary,I would that I were dead!"

I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time.

I am MerlinWho follow the Gleam.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,To rust unburnished, not to shine in use,As though to breathe were life!

I found Him in the shining of the stars,I mark'd Him in the flowering of His fields,But in His ways with men I find Him not.

But the tender grace of a day that is deadWill never come back to me.

My strength has the strength of ten because my heart is pure.

Like glimpses of forgotten dreams.

Theirs not to make reply,Theirs not to reason why,Theirs but to do and die.