51 quotes
Remorse is virtue's root; its fair increase
Are fruits of innocence and blessedness.
Poems (1832)
Go forth under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings.
Thanatopsis (1817)
Where hast thou wandered, gentle gale, to find
The perfumes thou dost bring?
These struggling tides of life that seem
In wayward, aimless course to tend,
Are eddies of the mighty stream
That rolls to its appointed end.
The hills,
Rock-ribbed, and ancient as the sun.
Thanatopsis (1817)
The shad-bush, white with flowers,
Brightened the glens; the new leaved butternut
And quivering poplar to the roving breeze
Gave a balsamic fragrance.
The victory of endurance born.
A sculptor wields
The chisel, and the stricken marble grows
To beauty.
He who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.
Poems (1832)
Ah, why
Should we, in the world's riper years, neglect
God's ancient sanctuaries, and adore
Only among the crowd and under roofs
That our frail hands have raised?
Poems (1832)
The moon is at her full, and riding high,
Floods the calm fields with light.
The airs that hover in the summer sky
Are all asleep to-night.
The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.
Poems (1832)
But ’neath yon crimson tree
Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame,
Nor mark, within its roseate canopy,
Her blush of maiden shame.
Poems (1832)
The stormy March has come at last,
With winds and clouds and changing skies;
I hear the rushing of the blast
That through the snowy valley flies.
Poems (1832)
These are the gardens of the Desert, these
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
For which the speech of England has no name—
The Prairies.
The summer day is closed, the sun is set
Well they have done their office, those bright hours,
The latest of whose tram goes softly out
In the red west.
Sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one that wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste.
Thanatopsis (1817)
She should be my counsellor,
But not my tyrant. For the spirit needs
Impulses from a deeper source than hers;
And there are motions, in the mind of man,
That she must look upon with awe.
Glorious are the woods in their latest gold and crimson,
Yet our full-leaved willows are in the freshest green.
Such a kindly autumn, so mercifully dealing
With the growths of summer, I never yet have seen.
Thirty Poems (1864)