19th-century Poet Quotes

LUCIFER: Only the chemistry of love can make Two atoms one.

The light died out and left the sky,
We sighed and rose and said good-bye,
We had forgotten — He and I,
That he was dead, that I must die.

Agnes Mary Frances Duclaux

Our freedom is but a light that breaks through from another world.

Nikolai Gumilev

To a nice ear, the quality of a voice is singularly affecting. Its depth seems to be allied to feeling; at least, the contralto notes alone give an adequate sense of pathos. They are born near the heart.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman

What a shame that love has no dictionary in which to ascertain when pride is simply pride and when it's 'dignity'!

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

" Tis plain to me
As A B C,
My dear friend, Mr. Neff!"
"Oh, yes! but then,"
Says Mr. N,
"You know I'm D E F!"

Charles Follen Adams

Here come the Slavophiles and Nihilists, and none of them have clean fingernails.

Don Carlos was one of those peaceful and indolent men who do not know how to do evil, nor to go to great lengths to do good.

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

There is no great; there is no small; in the mind that causeth all

I laugh, for hope hath happy place with me;
If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea.

William Ellery Channing (poet)

Why hold ye so my heart, nor dimly let
Through your deep leaves the light of yesterday,
The faded glimmer of a sunshine set?
Is it that in your darkness, shut from strife,
The bread of tears becomes the bread of life?
Far from the roar of day, beneath your boughs
Fresh griefs beat tranquilly, and loves and vows
Grow green in your gray shadows, dearer far
Even than all lovely lights and roses are?

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman

Rich apricots, that breathed of mountain flowers.

Frederick Tennyson

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men, and the love of little children;…whose life was an inspiration, whose memory a benediction.

Bessie Anderson Stanley

We knew thee of old,
O divinely restored,
By the light of thine eyes And the light of thy sword.
From the graves of our slain Shall thy valor prevail As we greet thee again—
Hail, Liberty! Hail!

Dionysios Solomos

The mere collection of facts, without some basis of theory for guidance and elucidation, is foolish and profitless.

Gamaliel Bradford (biographer)

An age being mathematical, these flowers Of linear stalks and spheroid blooms were prized.

I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
Toil on, poor heart, unceasingly;
And thou shalt find thy dream to be
A truth and noonday light to thee.

Ellen Sturgis Hooper

Is life worth living? Aye, with the best of us, Heights of us, depths of us- Life is the test of us!

Corinne Roosevelt Robinson

I know that no reader ever asks a question. A writer must force his favors upon his readers.

What men have done can still be done
And shall be done today.

Wales, Wales, sweet are thy hills and vales,
Thy speech, thy song,
To thee belong,
O may they live ever in Wales.

The children eat and wriggle and laugh,
The two old ladies stroke their silk;
But the cat is grown small and thin with desire,
Transformed to a creeping lust for milk.

Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord,
Who was the Future, died full long ago.
Knowledge which is the Past is folly.

Trumbull Stickney

Those two wholesome defects of the French people, malice and curiosity, both of which are essential to its greatness.

Man's evolution from the brute Affords him, with so many gains, Life, liberty and the pursuit Of peak-time buses, trams and trains.

Frederick Macartney