75 quotes
A night of tears! for the gusty rain
Had ceased, but the eaves were dripping yet;
And the moon look'd forth, as tho' in pain,
With her face al white and wet.
The Wanderer (1859)
Ah, well! when time is flown, how it fled
It is better neither to ask nor tell.
Leave the dead moments to bury their dead.
The Wanderer (1859)
That, in tracing the shade, I shall find out the sun,
Trust to me!
For Art is Nature made by Man
To Man the interpreter of God.
Art is Nature made by Man
To Man the interpreter of God.
The world is fill'd with folly and sin,
And Love must cling where it can, I say:
For Beauty is easy enough to win;
But one isn't loved every day.
The Wanderer (1859)
In the lives of most women and men
There's a moment when all would go smooth and even,
If only the dead could find out when
To come back and be forgiven.
The Wanderer (1859)
'Tis more brave
To live, than to die.
Lucile (1860)
That's best
Which God sends. 'Twas His will: it is mine.
Lucile (1860)
Weary the cloud falleth out of the sky,
Dreary the leaf lieth low.
All things must come to the earth by and by,
Out of which all things grow.
Ay, these young things lie safe in our hearts just so long
As their wings are in growing; and when these are strong
They break it, and farewell! the bird flies!
What's saved affords
No indication of what's lost.
And the jasmin-flower in her fair young breast:
(O the faint, sweet smell of that jasmin-flower!)
And the one bird singing alone in his nest:
And the one star over the tower.
The Wanderer (1859)
The ages roll
Forward; and, forward with them, draw my soul
Into Time’s infinite sea.
And to be glad or sad I care no more:
But to have done, and to have been, before
I cease to do and be!
The Wanderer (1859)
The man who seeks one thing in life and but one
May hope to achieve it before life is done;
But he who seeks all things, wherever he goes
Only reaps from the hopes which around him he sows
A harvest of barren regrets.
Lucile (1860)
We are our own fates. Our deeds
Are our doomsmen. Man's life was made not for men's creeds,
But men's actions.
Lucile (1860)
Unseen hands delay
The coming of what seems close in ken,
And, contrary, the moment when we say
"'Twill never come!" comes on us even then.
Chronicles and Characters (1868)
But, however we pass Time, he passes still,
Passing away whatever the pastime,
And, whether we use him well or ill,
Some day he gives us the slip for the last time.
Chronicles and Characters (1868)
'Twas a hand
White, delicate, dimpled, warm, languid, and bland.
The hand of a woman is often, in youth,
Somewhat rough, somewhat red, somewhat graceless in truth;
Does its beauty refine, as its pulses grow calm,
Or as sorrow has cross'd the life-line in its palm.
Lucile (1860)
Alas! must it be ever so?
Do we stand in our own light, wherever we go,
And fight our own shadows forever?
Lucile (1860)