Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art-- Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite.

I am sailing with thee through the dizzy sky! How beautiful thou art!

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath;

When it is moving on luxurious wings, The soul is lost in pleasant smotherings.

Knowledge enormous makes a god of me.

I will clamber through the clouds and exist.

--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence.

Already with thee! tender is the night. . . But here there is no light. . .

The air is all softness.

Scenery is fine -but human nature is finer

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance".

Love is my religion--I could die for it.

I find I cannot exist without Poetry

I see a lily on thy brow, With anguish moist and fever dew; And on thy cheek a fading rose Fast withereth too.

You speak of Lord Byron and me; there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.

Alas! when passion is both meek and wild!

Was it a vision or a waking dream? Fled is that music--do I wake or sleep?

And when thou art weary I'll find thee a bed, Of mosses and flowers to pillow thy head.

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.

Through buried paths, where sleepy twilight dreams The summer time away.

I must choose between despair and Energy──I choose the latter.

Closer of lovely eyes to lovely dreams, Lover of loneliness, and wandering, Of upcast eye, and tender pondering! Thee must I praise above all other glories That smile us on to tell delightful stories.

Like a mermaid in sea-weed, she dreams awake, trembling in her soft and chilly nest.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty

We have woven a web, you and I, attached to this world but a separate world of our own invention.

It keeps eternal whisperings around desolate shores

Nothing ever becomes real till experienced – even a proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it

The creature has a purpose, and his eyes are bright with it.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget...

To Sorrow I bade good-morrow, And thought to leave her far away behind; But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly: She is so constant to me, and so kind.

I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.

I never was in love - yet the voice and the shape of a woman has haunted me these two days.

To feel forever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever-or else swoon in death.

Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.

O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; It will never Pass into nothingness.

I wish I was either in your arms full of faith, or that a Thunder bolt would strike me.

Dancing music, music sad, Both together, sane and mad…

You cannot conceive how I ache to be with you: how I would die for one hour...

You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.

It ought to come like the leaves to the trees, or it better not come at all.

My chest of books divide amongst my friends--

Thou art a dreaming thing, A fever of thyself.

We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.

My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.

I have so much of you in my heart.

Now a soft kiss - Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss.