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Robert Southey Quotes

d. 1843 England

Robert Southey (August 12 1774 – March 21 1843) was an English poet of the Romantic school, one of the so-called Lake Poets, and Poet Laureate.

England
Poets

Also known as: Southey, Southey, Robert

Random Robert Southey quote

67 quotes

Earth could not hold us both, nor can one heaven
Contain my deadliest enemy and me.

Where Washington hath left
His awful memory
A light for after times!

Ode written during the War with America (1814)

But what they fought each other for
I could not well make out.

The Battle of Blenheim (1798)

From his brimstone bed, at break of day,
A-walking the Devil is gone,
To look at his little, snug farm of the World,
And see how his stock went on.

The Devil's Walk (1799)

Death! to the happy thou art terrible;
But how the wretched love to think of thee,
O thou true comforter! the friend of all
Who have no friend beside!

Yet leaving here a name, I trust,
That will not perish in the dust.

Ye who dwell at home,
Ye do not know the terrors of the main.

Then more fierce
The conflict grew; the din of arms, the yell
Of savage rage, the shriek of agony,
The groan of death, commingled in one sound
Of undistinguish'd horrors.

Madoc in Wales (1805)

When St. Thomas Aquinas was asked in what manner a man might best become learned, he answered, "By reading one book." The homo unius libri is indeed proverbially formidable to all conversational figurantes.

They sin who tell us love can die;
With life all other passions fly,
All others are but vanity.
. . . . .
Love is indestructible,
Its holy flame forever burneth;
From heaven it came, to heaven returneth.
. . . . .
It soweth here with toil and care,
But the harvest-time of love is there.

The Curse of Kehama (1810)

"In my days of youth, I remembered my God,
And he hath not forgotten my age."

Somebody has been sitting in my chair!

The arts babblative and scribblative.

Mild arch of promise! on the evening sky
Thou shinest fair with many a lovely ray,
Each in the other melting.

"'Tis some poor fellow's skull," said he,
"Who fell in the great victory."

The Battle of Blenheim (1798)

Midnight, and yet no eye
Through all the Imperial City closed in sleep.

And then she went to the porridge of the Little, Small, Wee Bear, and tasted that; and that was neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.

What a world were this,
How unendurable its weight, if they
Whom Death hath sundered did not meet again!

He came to ask what he had found,
That was so large, and smooth, and round.

The Battle of Blenheim (1798)

He passed a cottage with a double coach-house,
A cottage of gentility;
And he owned with a grin
That his favorite sin
Is pride that apes humility.

The Devil's Walk (1799)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Robert Southey (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.