The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

Vows can’t change nature, priests are only men.
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O lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire.
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So, Pietro craved an heir,
(The story always old and always new).
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Go practise if you please
With men and women: leave a child alone
For Christ’s particular love’s sake!
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In the great right of an excessive wrong.
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Through such souls alone
God stooping shows sufficient of His light
For us i’ the dark to rise by. And I rise.
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Faultless to a fault.
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Why comes temptation but for man to meet
And master and make crouch beneath his foot,
And so be pedestalled in triumph?
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White shall not neutralize the black, nor good
Compensate bad in man, absolve him so:
Life’s business being just the terrible choice.
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There’s a new tribunal now
Higher than God’s,—the educated man’s!
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Into that sad obscure sequestered state
Where God unmakes but to remake the soul
He else made first in vain; which must not be.
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It is the glory and good of Art,
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine, at least.
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’Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!