19th-century Poet Quotes

And elm-trees, massed like ostrich feather plumes,
Are streaked and shot with fire.

Dorothy Wellesley, Duchess of Wellington

Threadbare his songs seem now, to lettered ken: They were worn threadbare next the hearts of men.

It is easy to be humble when a greater is preferred; but when an inferior is lifted high above our heads, how can we bear it?

Constance Fenimore Woolson

Woods are to us anything but solitudes - they are populous and inexhaustible worlds, where creatures that mock the grasp but not the mind, a matchless phantasmagoria, flit before us; alternately make us merry with their pleasant follies, delight us with their romantic grandeur and beauty, and elevate our hearts with their sublime sentiments.

'Qui procul hinc', the legend's writ,—
The frontier-grave is far away—
'Qui ante diem periit:
Sed miles, sed pro patria.'

Though Duty's face is stern, her path is best: They sweetly sleep who die upon her breast.

The oppressed martyrs of our culture have shed blood that nourish the red tulips of our nation.

Women live only in the emotion that love gives. An old lady confessed that she had loved much, when young: "Ah!" she exclaimed, "the exquisite pain of those days!"

Arsène Houssaye

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow... the hour
Before the dawn... the mouth of one
Just dead.

Adelaide Crapsey

Shall I not bless the middle years?
Not I for youth repine.

Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn

Chivalry, I don't abuse you,
Not at all — the only rub
Is that those who praise you, use you
Very often as a club.

Alice Duer Miller

But women who have lost their Faith Are angels who have lost their wings, And always have a nasty breath Of chemistry, and horrid things That go off when a lecturer rings His bell.

Walter Chalmers Smith

Island of grace, of freshness and of joy, Golden Age of children; always I could find you in my life, a sea of mourning; let your breeze lend me its lyre high and sometimes senseless like the trill of the lark in the white sun of morning.
I have never written nor will I ever write anything for children, because I believe the child can read the books that grownups read, with some few exceptions that come to everyone's mind. There are of course exceptions too for men and for women.

Juan Ramón Jiménez

Grief, I have cursed thee often — now at last
To hate thy name I am no longer free;
Caught in thy bony arms and prisoned fast,
I love no love but thee.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

Friendship is like love at its best; not blind but sympathetically all-seeing; a support which does not wait for understanding; an act of faith which does not need, but always has, reason.

Louis Untermeyer

The things I have
are nameless,
old and true;
they may not be named;
few may live and know.

During this earlier period of his activity Voltaire seems to have been trying - half unconsciously, perhaps - to discover and to express the fundamental quality of his genius.

Lytton Strachey

In all the good Greek of Plato
I lack my roastbeef and potato.

A better man was Aristotle,
Pulling steady on the bottle.

John Crowe Ransom

Oh, whoever has been himself alone can never find another's loneliness strange.

Robert Walser (writer)

She breathed the husky whisper—
"Curfew must not ring tonight."

Rose Hartwick Thorpe

I first saw the light on the 5th of August, 1860, I was born in Lee Street, Wharf Street, Leicester. The deformity which I am now exhibiting was caused by my mother being frightened by an Elephant; my mother was going along the street when a procession of Animals were passing by, there was a terrible crush of people to see them, and unfortunately she was pushed under the Elephant's feet, which frightened her very much; this occurring during a time of pregnancy was the cause of my deformity.

What is this that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!…
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!

I love vast libraries; yet there is a doubt, If one be better with them or without,-- Unless he use them wisely, and, indeed, Knows the high art of what and how to read.

John Godfrey Saxe

We are the whirlwinds that winnow the West—
We scatter the wicked like straw!
We are the Nemeses, never at rest—
We are Justice, and Right, and the Law!

Margaret Ashmun

The noble Nazarene... who raged against "the world," against the philistinism, the halfheartedness, the lack of ideals—if he had guessed that he was forging a weapon for the hands of exactly "this world"—he who sensed the misfortune of humanity so deeply that he didn't find any other solution to its enigma than to entirely reject and turn his back on all that is earthly, would see his name dragged into the service of an intense philistine optimism.

Vilhelm Ekelund