Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries: With Recollections of the Author's Life, and of His Visit to Italy, Volume 1

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Henry Colburn, 1828 - Authors - 440 pages
 

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Page 226 - Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan...
Page 225 - Ode to a Nightingale MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thy happiness, — That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
Page 227 - Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades Past the near meadows, over the still stream, Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music: — Do I wake or sleep?
Page 187 - I see the Deep's untrampled floor With green and purple seaweeds strown ; I see the waves upon the shore, Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown : I sit upon the sands alone, The lightning of the noontide ocean Is flashing round me, and a tone Arises from its measured motion, How sweet ! did any heart now share in my emotion.
Page 225 - Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Page 226 - I have been half in love with easeful Death, Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath ; Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy!
Page 175 - The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.
Page 224 - Scarce images of life, one here, one there, Lay vast and edgeways; like a dismal cirque Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor, When the chill rain begins at shut of eve, In dull November, and their chancel vault, The Heaven itself, is blinded throughout night.
Page 224 - There was a listening fear in her regard, As if calamity had but begun; As if the vanward clouds of evil days Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear Was with its stored thunder labouring up.
Page 158 - I will be wise, And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies Such power, for I grow weary to behold The selfish and the strong still tyrannize Without reproach or check.

About the author (1828)

Leigh Hunt was so prolific that, if his writing were ever collected, it would exceed 100 volumes of mostly unmemorable prose. He was so eccentric and socially visible that even Dickens's caricature of Hunt as the perennially cheerful Harold Skimpole in Bleak House is immediately recognizable. But his philosophy of cheer, however eccentric among such doleful writers of his generation as Coleridge and Byron, appealed to middle-class public taste, which accounts for his immense following. Educated, like Coleridge and Lamb, at Christ's Hospital, Hunt became a journalist, helping his brother John edit the weekly Examiner. As a result of the paper's liberal policy, they were both fined and imprisoned for two years for writing a libelous description of the Prince Regent on his birthday. Hunt turned his prison cell into a salon and enjoyed visits from Jeremy Bentham, Byron, Keats, Lamb, and Hazlitt. After his release, Hunt settled in Hampstead, London, a political martyr and a model of domesticity. His writing includes The Feast of the Poets (1814), a satire of contemporary writers; The Story of Rimini (1816), a saccharine Italianate romance; and Hero and Leander (1819). Young poets such as Keats found the sensual surfaces easy to imitate. But mostly Hunt wrote essays and edited dozens of short-lived magazines and journals, providing an insight into the literary life of London during this period.

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