The Opal, Volume 2

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State Lunatic Asylum, 1852

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Page 373 - It must be so — Plato, thou reasonest well ; Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after immortality ? Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror, Of falling into nought ? Why shrinks the soul Back on herself, and startles at destruction ? Tis the divinity that stirs within us ; 'Tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter, And intimates eternity to man...
Page 373 - Soon as the evening shades prevail The moon takes up the wondrous tale, And nightly to the listening earth Repeats the story of her birth...
Page 333 - Treason, treason!" echoed from every part of the house. Henry faltered not for an instant, but, taking a loftier attitude, and fixing on the speaker an eye of fire, he added " may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it...
Page 88 - Lives through all life, extends through all extent, Spreads undivided, operates unspent ; Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part, As full, as perfect in a hair as heart ; As full, as perfect in vile man that mourns, As the rapt seraph that adores and burns. To Him no high, no low, no great, no small ; He fills, He bounds, connects and equals all.
Page 167 - The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven ; And, as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation, and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That, if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy ; Or, in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear ! Hip.
Page 298 - These are the eternal immutable laws of good and evil, to which the Creator himself, in all his dispensations, conforms; and which he has enabled human reason to discover, so far as they are necessary for the conduct of human actions.
Page 88 - Were we to press, inferior might on ours; Or in the full creation leave a void, Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroy'd: From Nature's chain whatever link you strike, Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike. And, if each system in gradation roll Alike essential to th' amazing whole, The least confusion but in one, not all That system only, but the whole must fall.
Page 352 - O eloquent, just, and mighty Death ! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded ; what none hath dared, thou hast done ; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised ; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hie jacet...
Page 86 - AWAKE, my St John ! leave all meaner things To low ambition, and the pride of kings. Let us (since life can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die...
Page 87 - Better for us, perhaps, it might appear, Were there all harmony, all virtue here; That never air or ocean felt the wind; That never passion discomposed the mind. But all subsists by elemental strife; And passions are the elements of life.

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