“How the moon triumphs through the endless nights!How the stars throb and glitter as they wheelTheir thick processions of supernal lightsAround the blue vault obdurate as steel!And men regard with passionate awe and yearningThe mighty marching and the golden burning,And think the heavens respond to what they feel.Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dreamAre glorified from vision as they passThe quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream;Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glassTo restless crystals; cornice dome and columnEmerge from chaos in the splendour solemn;Like faery lakes gleam lawns of dewy grass.With such a living light these dead eyes shine,These eyes of sightless heaven, that as we gazeWe read a pity, tremulous, divine,Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays:Fond man! they are not haughty, are not tender;There is no heart or mind in all their splendour,They thread mere puppets all their marvellous maze.”

“Once in a stately passion I cried with desperate grief'Oh Lord, my heart is black with guile, of sinners I am chief'Then stooped my guardian angel and whispered from behind 'Vanity my little man, you're nothing of the kind' ”

“Gashed with honourable scars, Low in Glory's lap they lie; Though they fell, they fell like stars, Streaming splendour through the sky.”

“Look at the sky. It’s not dark and black and without character. The black is, in fact deep blue. And over there: lighter blue and blowing through the blues and blackness the winds swirling through the air and then shining, burning, bursting through: the stars! And you see how they roar their light. Everywhere we look, the complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes.”

“And now at last authentic word I bring,Witnessed by every dead and living thing;Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:There is no God; no Fiend with names divineMade us and tortures us; if we must pine,It is to satiate no Being's gall.It was the dark delusion of a dream,That living Person conscious and supreme,Whom we must curse for cursing us with life;Whom we must curse because the life he gaveCould not be buried in the quiet grave,Could not be killed by poison or the knife.This little life is all we must endure,The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,We fall asleep and never wake again;Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,Whose elements dissolve and merge afreshIn earth, air, water, plants, and other men.We finish thus; and all our wretched raceShall finish with its cycle, and give placeTo other beings with their own time-doom:Infinite aeons ere our kind began;Infinite aeons after the last manHas joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb.”

“Who is most wretched in this dolorous place?I think myself; yet I would rather beMy miserable self than He, than HeWho formed such creatures to His own disgrace.The vilest thing must be less vile than ThouFrom whom it had its being, God and Lord!Creator of all woe and sin! abhorredMalignant and implacable! I vowThat not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,For all the temples to Thy glory built,Would I assume the ignominious guiltOf having made such men in such a world.As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign,At once so wicked, foolish and insane,As to produce men when He might refrain!The world rolls round for ever like a mill;It grinds out death and life and good and ill;It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.While air of Space and Time's full river flowThe mill must blindly whirl unresting so:It may be wearing out, but who can know?Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,That it is quite indifferent to him.Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith?It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath,Then grinds him back into eternal death.”

“In winter darkness, the Baghdad Arabian keen blue deepness of the piercing lovely January winter's dusk--it used to tear my heart out, one stabbing soft star was in the middle of the magicalest blue, throbbing like love--I saw Maggie's black hair in this night-- In the shelves of Orion her eye shades, borrowed, gleamed a dark and proud vellum somber power brooding rich bracelets of the moon rose from our snow, and surrounded the mystery.”