Langdon Smith Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn,
Where the mammoth came to drink;
Through brawn and bone I drave the stone
And slew him upon the brink.

Langdon Smith
And that was a million years ago
In a time that no man knows;
Yet here tonight in the mellow light
We sit at Delmonico's.
Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs,
Your hair is dark as jet,
Your years are few, your life is new,
Your soul untried, and yet —

Langdon Smith
I flaked a flint to a cutting edge
And shaped it with brutish craft;
I broke a shank from the woodland lank
And fitted it, head and haft.

Langdon Smith
Then as we linger at luncheon here
O'er many a dainty dish,
Let us drink anew to the time when you
Were a tadpole and I was a fish.

Langdon Smith
Yet happy we lived and happy we loved,
And happy we died once more;
Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold
Of a Neocomian shore.
The eons came and the eons fled
And the sleep that wrapped us fast
Was riven away in a newer day
And the night of death was past.

Langdon Smith
And, oh! what beautiful years were these
When our hearts clung each to each;
When life was filled and our senses thrilled
In the first faint dawn of speech.

Langdon Smith
Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Till there came a time in the law of life
When o'er the nursing sod,
The shadows broke and soul awoke
In a strange, dim dream of God.

Langdon Smith
God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds
And furnished them wings to fly;
We sowed our spawn in the world's dim dawn,
And I know that it shall not die,
Though cities have sprung above the graves
Where the crook–bone men made war
And the ox–wain creaks o'er the buried caves
Where the mummied mammoths are.

Langdon Smith
When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.

Langdon Smith
Mindless we lived and mindless we loved
And mindless at last we died;
And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death
And crept into light again.

Langdon Smith
Our love is old, our lives are old,
And death shall come amain;
Should it come today, what man may say
We shall not live again?

Langdon Smith
Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes,
Loud answered our kith and kin;
From west and east to the crimson feast
The clan came tramping in.

Langdon Smith
Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.

Langdon Smith
I was thewed like an Auroch bull
And tusked like the great cave bear;
And you, my sweet, from head to feet
Were gowned in your glorious hair.

Langdon Smith
I carved that fight on a reindeer bone
With rude and hairy hand;
I pictured his fall on the cavern wall
That men might understand.
For we lived by blood and the right of might
Ere human laws were drawn,
And the age of sin did not begin
Till our brutal tusks were gone.

Langdon Smith
In the mud of the Cambrian main Did our earliest ancestor dive: From a shapeless albuminous grain We mortals our being derive. He could split himself up into five, Or roll himself round like a ball; For the fittest will always survive, While the weakliest go to the wall.

Langdon Smith