Democracy
“I am black, I am black!--
I wore a child upon my breast
An amulet that hung too slack,
And, in my unrest, could not rest:
Thus we went moaning, child and mother,
One to another, one to another,
Until all ended for the best:
……….
And so, to save it from my curse,
I twisted it round in my shawl.
And he moaned and trembled from foot to head,
He shivered from head to foot;
Till, after a time, he lay instead
Too suddenly still and mute.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning - "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point"
“never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)”
“Must see you—you, and not with me? Those loans?
More gaming debts to pay? you smiled for that?
Well, let smiles buy me! have you more to spend?
While hand and eye and something of a heart
Are left me, work’s my ware, and what’s it worth?”
“The young lambs are bleating in the meadows,
The young birds are chirping in the nest,
The young fawns are playing with the shadows,
The young flowers are blowing toward the west —
But the young, young children, O my brothers,
They are weeping bitterly!
They are weeping in the playtime of the others,
In the country of the free.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning - "The Cry of Children"
“This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the scepter and the isle—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.”
"in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; . . . it is to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heartworm, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt-in with a cold universal Laissez-faire: it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite Injustice”
Thomas Carlyle - Past and Present
“The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
……….
I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her.”
Robert Browning - "Porphyria's Lover"
“But poets should
Exert a double vision; should have eyes
To see near things as comprehensively 185
As if afar they took their point of sight,
And distant things as intimately deep
As if they touched them.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Aurora Leigh
“On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And through the field the road run by
To many-towered Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson - "The Lady of Shalott"
“Lashing their tails
They trod and hustled her,
Elbowed and jostled her,
Clawed with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,
Twitched her hair out by the roots,
Stamped upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeezed their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat.
White and golden Lizzie stood,
Like a lily in a flood,--
Like a rock of blue-veined stone
Lashed by tides obstreperously,--
Like a beacon left alone
In a hoary roaring sea,
Sending up a golden fire,--
Like a fruit-crowned orange-tree
White with blossoms honey-sweet
Sore beset by wasp and bee,--
Like a royal virgin town
Topped with gilded dome and spire
Close beleaguered by a fleet
Mad to tug her standard down.”
Christina Rossetti - Goblin Market
“a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither masters nor master’s man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain-sick brain workers, not heart-sick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living equally of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all.”
William Morris - "How I Became a Socialist"
“My cousin Nell is fond of fun,
And fond of dress, and change, and praise,
So mere a woman in her ways:
And if her sweet eyes rich in youth
Are like her lips that tell the truth,
My cousin Nell is fond of love.
And she's the girl I'm proudest of.
……….
Of the same lump (as it is said)
For honour and dishonour made,
Two sister vessels. Here is one.”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti - "Jenny"
“That arm is wrongly put—and there again—
A fault to pardon in the drawing’s lines,
Its body, so to speak: its soul is right,
He means right—that, a child may understand.
Still, what an arm! and I could alter it:
But all the play, the insight and the stretch—
Out of me, out of me!”
Robert Browning - "Andrea del Sarto"
“Understand this clearly: you can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one; to strike a curved line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind; but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool”
John Ruskin - "The Savageness of Gothic Architecture"
“Two days later I inquired after his welfare of the Superintendent of the Asylum.
“He was admitted suffering from sun-stroke. He died early yesterday morning,” said the Superintendent. “Is it true that he was half an hour bareheaded in the sun at midday?”
“Yes,” said I, “but do you happen to know if he had anything upon him by any chance when he died?”
“Not to my knowledge,” said the Superintendent.
And there the matter rests.”
Rudyard Kipling - "The Man Who Would Be King"
“No government by a democracy or a numerous aristocracy, either in its political acts or in the opinions, qualities, and tone of mind which it fosters, ever did or could rise above mediocrity, except so far as the sovereign Many have let themselves be guided (which in their best times they always have done) by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few.”
John Stuart Mill - On Liberty
"With blackest moss the flowerpots
Were thickly crusted, one and all,
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the peach to the gardenwall.
The broken sheds looked sad and strange,
Unlifted was the clinking latch,
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson - "Mariana"
“criticism, real criticism, is essentially the exercise of this very quality [curiosity]. It obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespective of practice, politics, and everything else of the kind: and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other considerations whatever”
Matthew Arnold - "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time"
“Two words, indeed, of praying we remember,
And at midnight's hour of harm,
'Our Father,' looking upward in the chamber,
We say softly for a charm.
……….
He is speechless as a stone.
And they tell us, of His image is the master
Who commands us to work on.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning - "The Cry of the Children"
“I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. . . . I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known—cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honored of them all—
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson - "Ulysses"
“It is the province of art to set the true ideal of a full and reasonable life before [the workman], a life to which the perception and creation of beauty, the enjoyment of real pleasure that is, shall be felt to be as necessary to man as his daily bread, and that no man, and no set of men, can be deprived of this except by mere opposition, which should be resisted to the utmost.”
William Morris - How I Became a Socialist
“The road went up about two miles, and then we saw a great and stately house, with many trees close around it, so close that in some places their branches dragged against the walls when the wind blew; and some hung broken down; for no one seemed to take much charge of the place;—to lop the wood, or to keep the moss-covered carriage-way in order”
“Nay, if there’s room for poets in this world
A little overgrown (I think there is),
Their sole work is to represent the age,
Their age, not Charlemagne’s,—this live, throbbing age,
That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,
And spends for passion, more heroic heat,
Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,
Than Roland with his knights at Roncesvalles.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Aurora Leigh
“. . . "Nay, nay," said Hall,
"Why take the style of those heroic times?
For nature brings not back the mastodon,
Nor we those times; and why should any man
Remodel models? these twelve books of mine
Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth,
Mere chaff and draff, much better burnt." "But I,"
Said Francis, "pick'd the eleventh from this hearth,
And have it; keep a thing, its use will come.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson - "The Epic"
“‘I won’t make a Nation,’ says he. ‘I’ll make an Empire! . . . Look at their eyes— look at their mouths. Look at the way they stand up. They sit on chairs in their own houses. They’re the Lost Tribes, or something like it, and they’ve grown to be English. I’ll take a census in the spring if the priests don’t get frightened. There must be a fair two million of ’em in these hills. The villages are full o’ little children. Two million people—two hundred and fifty thousand fighting men—and all English! They only want the rifles and a little drilling. Two hundred and fifty thousand men, ready to cut in on Russia’s right flank when she tries for India!”
Rudyard Kipling - "The Man Who Would be King"