Philip James Bailey was an English Spasmodic poet, best known as the author of Festus.
“Poets are all who love, who feel great truths,
And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.”
Scene XVI, The Hesperian Sphere
Festus (1839)
Scene IV, A Mountain; Sunrise. Compare: "The surest plan to make a man / Is to think him so", J. R. Lowell, Biglow Papers, II, ii. St. 9
Festus (1839)
“America thou half-brother of the world!
With something good and bad of every land.”
Scene X, Earth's Surface
Festus (1839)
“Who never doubted never half believed
Where doubt there truth is—'t is her shadow.”
Scene V, A Country Town; comparable to Alfred, Lord Tennyson "There lives more faith in honest doubt / Believe me, than in half the creeds."
Festus (1839)
“I cannot be content with less than heaven;
Living, and comprehensive of all life.”
Festus (1839)
Context: I cannot be content with less than heaven;
Living, and comprehensive of all life.
Thee, universal heaven, celestial all;
Thee, sacred seat of intellective time;
Field of the soul's best wisdom: home of truth,
Star-throned.
Festus (1839)
“We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.”
Scene V, A Country Town
Festus (1839)
Context: We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
Life's but a means unto an end; that end
Beginning, mean, and end to all things, — God.
The dead have all the glory of the world.
“Art is man's nature; nature is God's art.”
Proem
Festus (1839)
“Evil and good are God's right hand and left.”
Proem
Festus (1839)
