Alfred Tennyson Quotes

The vow that binds too strictly snaps itself.

- Tristram to Queen Isolt, The Last Tournament

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.

fairy changeling lay the mage;

He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring'd with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Love will conquer at the last.

Death's truer name Is "Onward," no discordance in the roll And march of that Eternal Harmony Whereto the world beats time.

This madness has come on us for our sins.

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?

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me — That ever with a frolic welcome took The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old; Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. Death closes all; but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.

I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally, And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley.

Love, then, had hope of richer store:
What end is here to my complaint?
This haunting whisper makes me faint,
‘More years had made me love thee more.

Yet I thought I saw her stand,
A shadow there at my feet,
High over the shadowy land.

The golden guess Is morning-star to the full round of truth.

But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

So now I have sworn to bury
All this dead body of hate
I feel so free and so clear
By the loss of that dead weight.