Quotes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The ship was cheered, the harbor cleared, Merrily did we drop Below the kirk, below the hill, Below the lighthouse top.

Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 'Twas sad as sad could be; And we did speak only to break The silence of the sea! All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon. Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.

Like cliffs which had been rent asunder; A dreary sea now flows between, But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, Shall wholly do away, I ween, The marks of that which once hath been.

And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of All?

For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky Lay like a load on my weary eye, And the dead were at my feet.

When a man is unhappy he writes damned bad poetry, I find.

Friends should be weighed, not told; who boasts to have won a multitude of friends has never had one.

Why look'st thou so?'— With my cross-bow I shot the ALBATROSS.

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us He made and loveth all. The Mariner, whose eye is bright, Whose beard with age is hoar, Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest Turned from the bridegroom's door.

The very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea.

On Pilgrim's Progress: "I could not have believed beforehand that Calvinism could be painted in such exquisitely delightful colors.

He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast.

Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day, So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear Most like articulate sounds of things to come! So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt, Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams! And so I brooded all the following morn, Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye Fixed with mock study on my swimming book.

By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from

And aye, beside her stalks her amarous knight! Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn, And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn, His hindward charms glean an unearthly white, Ah! thus thro' broken clouds at night's high Noon Peeps in fair fragments forth the full-orb'd harvest-moon!

In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.

A great poet must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest, the touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling child.

They parted—ne'er to meet again! But never either found another To free the hollow heart from paining— They stood aloof, the scars remaining, Like cliffs which had been rent asunder; A dreary sea now flows between;— But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, Shall wholly do away, I ween, The marks of that which once hath been.

Hence, viper thoughts, that coil around my mind, Reality's dark dream! I turn from you, and listen to the wind.

The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.

The mariners all 'gan work the ropes, where they were wont to do: They raised their limbs like lifeless tools - We were a ghastly crew.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

The ice was here, the ice was there,   The ice was all around: 60   It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,   Like noises in a swound!