Bayard Taylor Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

Opportunity is rare, and a wise man will never let it go by him.

Bayard Taylor
As I toiled up the Mount of Olives, in the very footsteps of Christ, panting with the heat and the difficult ascent, I found it utterly impossible to conceive that the Deity, in human form, had walked there before me.

Bayard Taylor
Yes, let the Angel blow!
A peal from the parted heaven,
The first of seven!—
The warning, not yet the sign, of woe!
That men arise
And look about them with wakened eyes,
Behold on their garments the dust and slime,
Refrain, forbear,
Accept the weight of a nobler care
And take reproach from the fallen time!

Bayard Taylor
The hollows are heavy and dank
With the steam of the Goldenrods.

Bayard Taylor
Once let the Angel blow! —
A peal from the parted heaven,
The first of seven! For the time is come that was foretold
So long ago!
As the avalanche gathers, huge and cold,
From the down of the harmless snow,
The years and the ages gather and hang
Till the day when the word is spoken:
When they that dwell in the end of time
Are smitten alike for the early crime,
As the vials of wrath are broken!

Bayard Taylor
All, wherein I have part,
All that was loss or gain, Slips from the clasping heart,
Breaks from the grasping brain. Lo, what is left? 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
No visitors shall yonder valley find.
Except the spirits of the rain and wind:
Here you must bide, my friends, with me entombed
In this dim crypt, where shelved around us lie
The mummied authors.

Bayard Taylor
They sang of love, and not of fame;
Forgot was Britain's glory;
Each heart recalled a different name,
But all sang Annie Lawrie.

Bayard Taylor
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgement Book unfold.

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

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

Bayard Taylor
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.

Bayard Taylor
I envy those old Greek bathers, into whose hands were delivered Pericles, and Alcibiades, and the perfect models of Phidias. They had daily before their eyes the highest types of Beauty which the world has ever produced; for of all things that are beautiful, the human body is the crown.

Bayard Taylor
Ancient Pines, Ye bear no record of the years of man. Spring is your sole historian...

Bayard Taylor
The Poet's leaves are gathered one by one,
In the slow process of the doubtful years.

Bayard Taylor
But still I dream that somewhere there must be
The spirit of a child that waits for me.

Bayard Taylor
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.

Bayard Taylor
An enthusiastic desire of visiting the Old World haunted me from early childhood. I cherished a presentiment, amounting almost to belief, that I should one day behold the scenes, among which my fancy had so long wandered.

Bayard Taylor
When May, with cowslip-braided locks,
Walks through the land in green attire.
And burns in meadow-grass the phlox
His torch of purple fire:
And when the punctual May arrives,
With cowslip-garland on her brow,
We know what once she gave our lives,
And cannot give us now!

Bayard Taylor
We follow and race In shifting chase, Over the boundless ocean-space! Who hath beheld when the race begun? Who shall behold it run?

Bayard Taylor
I was pleasantly disappointed on entering Bohemia. Instead of a dull, uninteresting country, as I expected, it is a land full of the most lovely scenery. There is every thing which can gratify the eye - high blue mountains, valleys of the sweetest pastoral look and romantic old ruins.

Bayard Taylor
The stream from Wisdom's well,
Which God supplies, is inexhaustible.

Bayard Taylor
Alone each heart must cover up its dead; Alone, through bitter toil, achieve its rest.

Bayard Taylor
London has the advantage of one of the most gloomy atmospheres in the world.

Bayard Taylor
Around the pillars of the palm-tree bower The orchids cling, in rose and purple spheres; Shield-broad the lily floats; the aloe flower Foredates its hundred years.

Bayard Taylor
And the wind that saddens, the sea that gladdens, Are singing the selfsame strain.

Bayard Taylor
Melrose is the finest remaining specimen of Gothic architecture in Scotland. Some of the sculptured flowers in the cloister arches are remarkably beautiful and delicate, and the two windows - the south and east oriels - are of a lightness and grace of execution really surprising.

Bayard Taylor
True, when you behold Damascus from the Salahiyeh, the last slope of the Anti-Lebanon, it is the realization of all that you have dreamed of Oriental splendor; the world has no picture more dazzling. It is Beauty carried to the Sublime, as I have felt when overlooking some boundless forest of palms within the tropics.

Bayard Taylor
I cannot assume emotions I do not feel, and must describe Jerusalem as I found it. Since being here, I have read the accounts of several travellers, and in many cases the devotional rhapsodies - the ecstacies of awe and reverence - in which they indulge, strike me as forced and affected.

Bayard Taylor
Who thinks, at night, that morn will ever be? Who knows, far out upon the central sea, That anywhere is land? And yet, a shore Has set behind us, and will rise before: A past foretells a future...

Bayard Taylor