85 quotes
All beauty is delightful; but human beauty … is the best of all.
A secret at home is like rocks under tide.
With faces like dead lovers who died true.
No virtue ever was founded on a lie. The truth, then, at all risks and costs — the truth from the beginning. Make a clean breast to whomsoever you need to make it, and then — face the world.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
Lad, I thought so. Thee hast found the curse of man's life—woman.
John Halifax, Gentleman (1856)
I am a Christian. I shall not return blow for blow.
John Halifax, Gentleman (1856)
O, my son's my son till he gets him a wife,
But my daughter's my daughter all her life.
Thirty Years, Being Poems New and Old (1880)
Duty's a slave that keeps the keys,
But Love, the master goes in and out
Of his goodly chambers with song and shout,
Just as he please—just as he please.
Loud wind, strong wind, sweeping o'er the mountains,
Fresh wind, free wind, blowing from the sea,
Pour forth thy vials like streams from airy mountains,
Draughts of life to me.
Do your neighbour good by all means in your power, moral as well as physical — by kindness, by patience, by unflinching resistance against every outward evil — by the silent preaching of your own contrary life.
A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858)
Two hands upon the breast,
And labour’s done;
Two pale feet crossed in rest,
The race is won.
Poems (1859)
Autumn to winter, winter into spring,
Spring into summer, summer into fall, —
So rolls the changing year, and so we change;
Motion so swift, we know not that we move.
Down in the deep, up in the sky,
I see them always, far or nigh,
And I shall see them till I die —
The old familiar faces.
Thirty Years, Being Poems New and Old (1880)
Douglas, Douglas, tender and true!
Wist ye not
That I must be about my Father's business?
Thirty Years, Being Poems New and Old (1880)
Two hands upon the breast,
And labor's done;
Two pale feet cross'd in rest,
The race is won.
[T]here is nothing so absolute as the tyranny of weakness.
Sermons out of Church (1875)
And all day long, so close and near,
As in a mystic dream I hear
Their gentle accents kind and dear —
The old familiar voices.
They have no sound that I can reach —
But silence sweeter is than speech.
Thirty Years, Being Poems New and Old (1880)
No rest—no dark.
Hour after hour that passionless bright face
Climbs up the desolate blue.
Hail, pallid crescent, hail!
Let me look on thee where thou sitt'st for aye
Like memory—ghastly in the glare of day,
But in the evening, light.