It was the morning; through the shutters closed, Along the balcony, the earliest rays Of sunlight my dark room were entering; When, at the time that sleep upon our eyes Its softest and most grateful shadows casts, There stood beside me, looking in my face, The image dear of her, who taught me first To love, then left me to lament her loss. To me she seemed not dead, but sad, with such A countenance as the unhappy wear. Her right hand near my head she sighing placed; 'Dost thou still live,' she said to me, 'and dost Thou still remember what we _were_ and are?' And I replied: 'Whence comest thou, and [...]

The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen, 1 That was the king Priamus sone of Troye, In lovinge, how his aventures fellen Fro wo to wele, and after out of Ioye, My purpos is, er that I parte fro ye. 5 Thesiphone, thou help me for tendyte Thise woful vers, that wepen as I wryte! To thee clepe I, thou goddesse of torment, Thou cruel Furie, sorwing ever in peyne; Help me, that am the sorwful instrument 10 That helpeth lovers, as I can, to pleyne! For wel sit it, the sothe for to seyne, A woful wight to han a drery fere, And, to a sorwful tale, a sory chere. For I, that [...]

We were in class when the head-master came in, followed by a "new fellow," not wearing the school uniform, and a school servant carrying a large desk. Those who had been asleep woke up, and every one rose as if just surprised at his work. The head-master made a sign to us to sit down. Then, turning to the class-master, he said to him in a low voice-- "Monsieur Roger, here is a pupil whom I recommend to your care; he'll be in the second. If his work and conduct are satisfactory, he will go into one of the upper classes, as [...]

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once--she had tried it--the sense of the slippery and of the sticky. She had looked at the sallow prints on the [...]

Travelling northward from the township of Otis, the road leads for twenty or thirty miles towards Windsor, lengthwise upon that long broken spur of heights which the Green Mountains of Vermont send into Massachusetts. For nearly the whole of the distance, you have the continual sensation of being upon some terrace in the moon. The feeling of the plain or the valley is never yours; scarcely the feeling of the earth. Unless by a sudden precipitation of the road you find yourself plunging into some gorge, you pass on, and on, and on, upon the crests or slopes of pastoral mountains, while far below, mapped out in its beauty, [...]

As a fisher-boy I fared To the black rock in the sea, And, while false gifts I prepared. Listen'd and sang merrily, Down descended the decoy, Soon a fish attack'd the bait; One exultant shout of joy,-- And the fish was captured straight. Ah! on shore, and to the wood Past the cliffs, o'er stock and stone, One foot's traces I pursued, And the maiden was alone. Lips were silent, eyes downcast As a clasp-knife snaps the bait, With her snare she seized me fast, And the boy was captured straight. Heav'n knows who's the happy swain That she rambles with anew! I must dare the sea again, Spite of wind and weather too. When the great and little fish Wail [...]

Thomas Gray, the son of Mr. Philip Gray, a scrivener of London, was born in Cornhill, November 26, 1716. His grammatical education he received at Eton, under the care of Mr. Antrobus, his mother's brother, then assistant to Dr. George, and when he left school, in 1734, entered a pensioner at Peterhouse, in Cambridge. The transition from the school to the college is, to most young scholars, the time from which they date their years of manhood, liberty, and happiness; but Gray seems to have been very little delighted with academical gratifications; he liked at Cambridge neither the mode of [...]

Thus far the tilth of fields and stars of heaven; Now will I sing thee, Bacchus, and, with thee, The forest's young plantations and the fruit Of slow-maturing olive. Hither haste, O Father of the wine-press; all things here Teem with the bounties of thy hand; for thee With viny autumn laden blooms the field, And foams the vintage high with brimming vats; Hither, O Father of the wine-press, come, And stripped of buskin stain thy bared limbs In the new must with me. First, nature's law For generating trees is manifold; For some of their own force spontaneous spring, No hand of man compelling, and possess The plains and river-windings far and wide, As pliant [...]

Ulysses, the winner, set sail for Lemnos, the island of Queen Hypsipyle and her father the famous Thoas, a country notorious in ancient times for the murder by its women of their men, to bring back the arrows of Tyrinthian Hercules. When he had brought them back to the Greeks, with Philoctetes their master, the last hand was dealt in the long drawn-out war. Troy fell, and Priam also. Hecuba, Priam’s unhappy wife, when all else was lost, lost her human form, and filled the air of an alien country, where the long Hellespont narrows to a strait, with strange [...]

A true lover is proved such by his pain of heart; No sickness is there like sickness of heart. The lover's ailment is different from all ailments; Love is the astrolabe of God's mysteries. A lover may hanker after this love or that love, But at the last he is drawn to the KING of love. However much we describe and explain love, When we fall in love we are ashamed of our words. Explanation by the tongue makes most things clear, But love unexplained is clearer. When pen hasted to write, On reaching the subject of love it split in twain. When the discourse touched on the matter of love, Pen was [...]