Alfred Tennyson Quotes

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be…
And thou, O Lord, art more than they.

Come, my friends.
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
For my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset.
And though we are not now that strength which in old days moved Earth and Heaven.
That which we are, we are; one equal temper of heroic hearts
made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
to strive, to seek, to find,
and not to yield.

Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of: Wherefore, let thy voice,
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.

And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shallot.

The thrall in person may be free in soul.

Gareth and Lynette

He often lying broad awake, and yet Remaining from the body, and apart In intellect and power and will, hath heard Time flowing in the middle of the night, And all things creeping to a day of doom.

So, Lady Flora, take my lay, And if you find no moral there, Go, look in any glass and say, What moral is in being fair. Oh, to what uses shall we put The wildweed-flower that simply blows? And is there any moral shut Within the bosom of the rose?

"Then some one said, "We will return no more";
And all at once they sang, "Our island home
Is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam.

Montenegro (1877)

THEY rose to where their sovereign eagle sails,
They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height,
Chaste, frugal, savage, arm'd by day and night
Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales
Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails,
And red with blood the Crescent reels from fight
Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight
By thousands down the crags and thro' the vales.
O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne
Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm
Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years,
Great Tsernogora! never since thine own
Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm
Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1880

It was the time when lilies blow, And clouds are highest up in air. Lord Ronald brought a lily-white doe To give his cousin, Lady Clare.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life!

So dear a life your arms enfold, Whose crying is a cry for gold.

And while he waited in the castle court,
The voice of Enid, Yniol's daughter, rang
Clear through the open casement of the hall,
Singing; and as the sweet voice of a bird,
Heard by the lander in a lonely isle,
Moves him to think what kind of bird it is
That sings so delicately clear, and make
Conjecture of the plumage and the form;
So the sweet voice of Enid moved Geraint;
And made him like a man abroad at morn
When first the liquid note beloved of men
Comes flying over many a windy wave
To Britain, and in April suddenly
Breaks from a coppice gemmed with green and red,
And he suspends his converse with a friend,
Or it may be the labour of his hands,
To think or say, 'There is the nightingale;'
So fared it with Geraint, who thought and said,
'Here, by God's grace, is the one voice for me.

His deeds yet live, the worst is yet to come. Yet let your sleep for this one night be sound: I do forgive him!

Whither in after life retired From brawling storms, From weary wind, With youthful fancy reinspired, We may hold converse with all forms Of the many-sided mind, And those whom passion hath not blinded, Subtle-thoughted, myriad-minded.