Sweet tears! the awful language, eloquent
Of infinite affection; far too big
For words.
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.
Her face with little drops was wet
Like pansy petals after rain.
So bright the tear in Beauty's eye,
Love half regrets to kiss it dry.
There is a tear for all who die,
A mourner o'er the humblest grave.
Behold who ever wept, and in his tears
Was happier far than others in their smiles.
The tears of the young who go their way, last a day;
But the grief is long of the old who stay.
When summoned hence to thine eternal sleep,
Oh, may'st thou smile while all around thee weep.
When sparrows build and the leaves break forth
My old sorrow wakes and cries.
There's not a string attuned to mirth
But has its chord in melancholy.