George Meredith (1828 – 1909)
English novelist and poet.
Earth, the mother of all,
Moves on her stedfast way,
Gathering, flinging, sowing.
Mortals, we live in her day,
She in her children is growing.
She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer,
Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won!
On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.
The well of true wit is truth itself.
Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:
So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.
Into the breast that gives the rose,
Shall I with shuddering fall?
More brain, O Lord, more brain! or we shall mar
Utterly this fair garden we might win.
She [Comedy] it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook.
What are we first? First, animals; and next
Intelligences at a leap; on whom
Pale lies the distant shadow of the tomb,
And all that draweth on the tomb for text.
Into which state comes Love, the crowning sun:
Beneath whose light the shadow loses form.
We are the lords of life, and life is warm.
Intelligence and instinct now are one.
But nature says: 'My children most they seem
When they least know me: therefore I decree
That they shall suffer.' Swift doth young Love flee,
And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.
Then if we study Nature we are wise.
Not till the fire is dying in the grate,
Look we for any kinship with the stars.
Oh, wisdom never comes when it is gold,
And the great price we pay for it full worth:
We have it only when we are half earth.
For singing till his heaven fills,
'Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup,
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes.
Civil limitation daunts
His utterance never; the nymphs blush, not he.
But O the truth, the truth! the many eyes
That look on it! the diverse things they see!
I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man.
The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts.
Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing.
Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious.
See ye not, Courtesy
Is the true Alchemy,
Turning to gold all it touches and tries?
In...the book of Egoism, it is written, possession without obligation to the object possessed approaches felicity.