Passions spin the plot:
We are betrayed by what is false within.

(George Meredith (1828-1909), British author. Modern Love, Sonnet 43 (1862).)

As the clouds the clouds chase;
And we go,
And we drop like the fruits of the tree,
Even we,
Even so.

(George Meredith (1828-1909), British poet. Dirge in Woods (l. 11-15). . . The Poems of George Meredith. Vol. 1. Phyllis B. Bartlett (1978) Yale University Press 1.)

Could I find a place to be alone with heaven,
I would speak my heart out heaven is my need.

(George Meredith (1828-1909), British poet. Love in the Valley (l. 81-82). . . The Poems of George Meredith. Vol. 1. Phyllis B. Bartlett (1978) Yale University Press 1.)

Swift doth young Love flee,
And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.

(George Meredith (1828-1909), British poet. Modern Love. . . The Poems of George Meredith. Vol. 1. Phyllis B. Bartlett (1978) Yale University Press 1.)

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life!

(George Meredith (1828-1909), British author. Modern Love, Sonnet 50 (1862).)

By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:

(George Meredith (1828-1909), British poet. Modern Love. . . The Poems of George Meredith. Vol. 1. Phyllis B. Bartlett (1978) Yale University Press 1.)

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 paid for it full worth:
We have it only when we are half earth.
Little avails that coinage to the old!

(George Meredith (1828-1909), British author. Modern Love, Sonnet 4 (1862). Cecil Day Lewis, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, wrote of this extract in his Introduction to the 1948 edition of the volume, that it was not originality that made it memorable, "it is a commonplace, whose force we are at last made to feel, through and through, by the inner conviction and the expressive grandeur of its utterance.")

In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betrayed by what is false within.

(George Meredith (1828-1909), British poet. Modern Love. . . The Poems of George Meredith. Vol. 1. Phyllis B. Bartlett (1978) Yale University Press 1.)

Love that so desires would fain keep her changeless;
Fain would fling the net, and fain have her free.

(George Meredith (1828-1909), British poet. Love in the Valley (l. 47-48). . . The Poems of George Meredith. Vol. 1. Phyllis B. Bartlett (1978) Yale University Press 1.)

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose,
Tired of his dark dominion, swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,

(George Meredith (1828-1909), British poet. Lucifer in Starlight (l. 1-3). . . The Poems of George Meredith. Vol. 1. Phyllis B. Bartlett (1978) Yale University Press 1.)