And he, a marble to her tears, is washed with them, but relents not.
Sadness Quotes
Sadness is Shakespeare’s page by a distance, with Byron a long way back and then Tennyson, Keats and Thomas Gray. The sourced lines include Wilde’s from De Profundis (1897), “Where there is sorrow there is holy ground,” and Horace’s from the Ars Poetica, which tells the writer that to make me weep, you yourself must first feel grief. Samuel Johnson is here for something less solemn, a mock-verse about a man who cries over turnips and not over his father’s death.
The one flagged entry is a passage on the sacredness of tears, credited to Washington Irving and marked misattributed.
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain
That has been, and may be again.
E’en like the passage of an angel’s tear
That falls through the clear ether silently.
And the tear that is wiped with a little address,
May be follow'd perhaps by a smile.
Each time we love,
We turn a nearer and a broader mark
To that keen archer, Sorrow, and he strikes.
When we are born we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time
In misery.
But woe awaits a country, when
She sees the tears of bearded men.
With sad unhelpful tears; and with dimm'd eyes
Look after him, and cannot do him good.
See, see what showers arise,
Blown with the windy tempest of my heart.
Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.