
The Lost Pleiad
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)
1840s, Past and Present (1843)
Context: Not a May-game is this man's life; but a battle and a march, a warfare with principalities and powers. No idle promenade through fragrant orange-groves and green flowery spaces, waited on by the choral Muses and the rosy Hours: it is a stern pilgrimage through burning sandy solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men; loves men, with inexpressible soft pity,—as they cannot love him: but his soul dwells in solitude, in the uttermost parts of Creation. In green oases by the palm-tree wells, he rests a space; but anon he has to journey forward, escorted by the Terrors and the Splendours, the Archdemons and Archangels. All Heaven, all Pandemonium are his escort. The stars keen-glancing, from the Immensities, send tidings to him; the graves, silent with their dead, from the Eternities. Deep calls for him unto Deep.
The Lost Pleiad
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)
Source: The Doctrine of the Mean
“Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.”
"Jean Francois", from Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches.
" The Chantry Of The Cherubim http://www.bartleby.com/236/219.html" in The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (1917) by D. H. S. Nicholson.
Context: p>I walk as one unclothed of flesh,
I wash my spirit clean;
I see old miracles afresh,
And wonders yet unseen.
I will not leave Thee till Thou give
Some word whereby my soul may live!I listened — but no voice I heard;
I looked — no likeness saw;
Slowly the joy of flower and bird
Did like a tide withdraw;
And in the heaven a silent star
Smiled on me, infinitely far.</p
¶ 6-7.
An Humble, Earnest and Affectionate Address to the Clergy (1761)
Context: All possible goodness that either can be named, or is nameless, was in God from all eternity, and must to all eternity be inseparable from him; it can be nowhere but where God is. As therefore before God created anything, it was certainly true that there was but one that was good, so it is just the same truth, after God has created innumerable hosts of blessed and holy and heavenly beings, that there is but one that is good, and that is God.
All that can be called goodness, holiness, divine tempers, heavenly affections, in the creatures, are no more their own, or the growth of their created powers, than they were their own before they were created. But all that is called divine goodness and virtue in the creature is nothing else, but the one goodness of God manifesting a birth and discovery of itself in the creature, according as its created nature is fitted to receive it. This is the unalterable state between God and the creature. Goodness for ever and ever can only belong to God, as essential to him and inseparable from him, as his own unity.