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I am bare
As a new-born soul, — I am naught:
My deeds are dust in air,
My words are ghosts of thought.
I ride through the night alone,
Detached from the life that seemed,
And the best I have felt or known
Is less than the least I dreamed.

— Bayard Taylor The Guests of Night (1871)

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More quotes by Bayard Taylor

Sleep, soldiers! still in honored rest
Your truth and valor wearing:
The bravest are the tenderest,—
The loving are the daring.

The Song of the Camp (1856)

Knowledge alone is the being of Nature,
Giving a soul to her manifold features,
Lighting through paths of the primitive darkness,
The footsteps of Truth and the vision of Song.

Kilimandjaro (1852)

If she but smile, the crystal calm shall break
In music, sweeter than it ever gave,
As when a breeze breathes o'er some sleeping lake,
And laughs in every wave.

The Return of the Goddess (1850)

And yonder fly his scattered golden arrows,
And smite the hills with day.

The Poet's Journal (1863)

Thunder-spasms the waking be
Into Life from Apathy:
Life, not Death, is in the gale, —
Let the coming Doom prevail!

The Poet's Journal (1863)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Bayard Taylor (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.