23 quotes
We love in others what we lack ourselves,
And would be every thing but what we are.
Children are the keys of Paradise.
… They alone are good and wise,
Because their thoughts, their very lives, are prayer.
Songs of Summer (1856)
There are gains for all our losses,
There are balms for all our pain:
But when youth, the dream, departs,
It takes something from our hearts,
And it never comes again.
Songs of Summer (1856)
Heaven is not gone, but we are blind with tears,
Groping our way along the downward slope of Years!
Silence is the speech of love,
The music of the spheres above.
Songs of Summer (1856)
A face at the window,
A tap on the pane:
Who is it that wants me
To-night in the rain?
The Book of the East and Other Poems (1871)
But let me silent be:
For silence is the speech of love,
The music of the spheres above.
Men can be great when great occasions call:
In little duties women find their spheres,
The narrow cares that cluster round the hearth.
She wears a rose in her hair,
At the twilight's dreamy close:
Her face is fair,—how fair
Under the rose!
Joy may be a miser,
But Sorrow’s purse is free.
The Book of the East and Other Poems (1871)
All Love is Beauty, and all Beauty—Love!
Not that the heavens the little can make great,
But many a man has lived an age too late.
We grow like flowers, and bear desire,
The odor of the human flowers.
If there is anything that will endure
The eye of God, because it still is pure,
It is the spirit of a little child,
Fresh from his hand, and therefore undefiled.
Not what we would, but what we must,
Makes up the sum of living;
Heaven is both more and less than just
In taking and in giving.
The Book of the East and Other Poems (1871)
Day and night my thoughts incline
To the blandishments of wine:
Jars were made to drain, I think,
Wine, I know, was made to drink!
The Book of the East and Other Poems (1871)
Pale in her fading bowers the Summer stands,
Like a new Niobe with claspèd hands,
Silent above the flowers, her children lost,
Slain by the arrows of the early frost.
It beckons, I follow.
Good by to the light!
I am going, oh! whither?
Out into the night!
The Book of the East and Other Poems (1871)
With no companion but the constant Muse,
Who sought me when I needed her—ah, when
Did I not need her, solitary else?
There is no death—the thing that we call death
Is but another, sadder name for life,
Which is itself an insufficient name,
Faint recognition of that unknown Life—
That Power whose shadow is the Universe.
The Poems of Richard Henry Stoddard (1880)