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22Undated
I’ve thought of all this pride, and all this pain, And all the insolent plenitudes of power, And I declare, by this most quiet hour, Which holds in different tasks by the fire-light She, and my friends here, this delightful night, That power itself has not one half the might Of Gentleness. ’Tis want to all true wealth; The uneasy madman’s force, to the wise health; Blind downward beating, to the eyes that see; Noise to persuasion, doubt to certainty; The consciousness of strength in enemies, Who must be strain’d upon or else they rise; The battle to the moon, who all the while, High out of hearing, passes with her smile: The tempest, trampled in his scanty run, To the whole globe, that basks about the sun; Or as all shrieks and clangs, with which a sphere, Undone and fired, could rake the midnight ear, Compared with that vast dumbness nature keeps Throughout her starry deeps, Most old, and mild, and awful, and unbroken, Which tells a tale of peace beyond whate’er was spoken.
Leigh Hunt / quote
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23Undated
I’ve thought, at gentle and ungentle hour, Of many an act and giant shape of power; Of the old kings with high exacting looks Sceptered and globed; of eagles on their rocks With straining feet, and that fierce mouth and drear, Answering the strain with downward drag austere; Of the rich-headed lion, whose huge frown, All his great nature, gathering, seems to crown; Then of cathedral with its priestly height, Seen from below at superstitions night; Of ghastly castle, that eternally Holds its blind visage out to the lone sea; And of all sunless subterranean deeps The creature makes, who listens while he sleeps; Avarice; and then of those old earthly cones, That stride, they say, over heroic bones; And those stone heaps Egyptian, whose small doors Look like low dens, under precipitous shores; And him, great Memnon, that long sitting by, In seeming idleness, with stony eye, Sang at the morning’s touch, like poetry; And then of all the fierce and bitter fruit Of the proud planting of a tyrannous foot, Of bruised right, and flourishing bad men, And virtue wasting heavenwards from a den; Brute force, and fury; and the devilish drouth Of the fool cannon’s ever-gaping mouth; And the bride-widowing sword; and the harsh bray The sneering trumpet sends across the fray; And all which lights the people-thinning star That selfishness invokes—the horsed war, Panting along with many a bloody mane.
Leigh Hunt / quote
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