Robert Browning

I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time.

Thou art my single day, God lends to leaven What were all earth else, with a feel of heaven.

But how carve way i' the life that lies before, If bent on groaning ever for the past?

Only I discern Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn.

God's justice, tardy though it prove perchance, Rests never on the track until it reach Delinquency.

A face to lose youth for, to occupy age With the dream of, meet death with.

You should not take a fellow eight years old and make him swear to never kiss the girls.

Ambition is not what man does... but what man would do.

Faultless to a fault.

What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?

It is the glory and good of Art, That Art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.

Better have failed in the high aim, as I, Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed As, God be thanked! I do not.

All June I bound the rose in sheaves, Now, rose by rose, I strip the leaves.

The moment eternal - just that and no more - When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut, and lips meet!

What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.

That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, lest you should think he never could recapture the first fine careless rapture!

Never the time and the place and the loved one all together!

Oh, to be in England now that April's there.

Stung by the splendour of a sudden thought.

Oh, the little more, and how much it is! And the little less, and what worlds away.