Letitia Elizabeth Landon Quotes

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A story from the stars; or rather one
Of starry fable from the olden time,
When young Imagination was as fresh
As the fair world it peopled with itself.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Can loveliness lose its power ? Ah, yes ! when love can lose its truth. Weak and impetuous, yielding to temptation, but trembling to enjoy the reward of the committed crime ; such is the man of whom my heart made its divinity, — for whose sake I would have toiled as a slave; ay, and do ; but with far other aim now. Let us but once meet again, Jehanghire, and thou art mine ! but I — I can never be thine again. Life, throne, fortunes, we will yet share together ; but my heart, never, never more !

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
The rich know not how hard it is to be of needful rest and needful food debarred.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
But o'er CYRENE'S cheek the rose,
Like moon-touch'd water, ebbs and flows;
And eyes that droop like Summer flowers
Told they could change with shine and showers.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
The hope that clings to the least glimpse of blue
Amid a sky of murkiness ; the fear
That sickens at itself; the fond deceit,
That will not see the truth ; the tenderness,
That only asks to trust ; and, at the last,
The knowledge we have known in vain so long
Comes like a thunderbolt, and crashes.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
The path was new, and there was thrown
A sweet veil over pleasure's ray ;
But ignorance is happiness,
When young Hope is to show the way

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Music moves us, and we know not why;
We feel the tears, but cannot trace their source.
Is it the language of some other state,
Born of its memory ? For what can wake
The soul's strong instinct of another world,
Like music?

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Philosophers are moral, and poets are picturesque about the country.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Oh! frail are the many links that are
In the chain of affection's tender care,

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Strength, power, and majesty, belong to man ;
They make the glory native to his life ;
But sweetness is a woman's attribute —
By that she has reigned, and by that will reign.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
I am persuaded there is no triumph equal to one achieved on the stage—it comes so immediate and so home : you have before you the mass of human beings whose sympathies are at your will; you witness the emotions which you raise, you see the tears which you command : the poet has erected the statue, but it is for you to give it life—the words must find their music on your lips—the generous sentiment, the exalted hope, the touches of deep feeling, ask their expression from you : surely such influence is among the triumphs of the mind, ay and a great and noble triumph.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
How many children, discontented with the exercise of needful authority, might learn submission and thankfulness from the lot of others ; such a temper as that we have been describing is very uncommon ; the treatment of children oftener errs on the side of over-indulgence than aught else. How many might be taught better to appreciate the blessings which surround them by considering what some, less fortunate than themselves, are called upon to endure!

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
And this is woman's fate:
All her affections are called into life
By winning flatteries, and then thrown back
Upon themselves to perish; and her heart,
Her trusting heart, filled with weak tenderness,
Is left to bleed or break!

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
There is a well of melancholy poetry in every human bosom. We have all mourned over the destroyed illusion and the betrayed hope. We have quarrelled in some embittered moment with an early friend, and when too late lamented the estrangement.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
I have won him, and shall keep him ; for to his weak temper habit will be as fetters of iron. I have won him — but how? He remembered not the earnest and devoted love of the young heart, which was his, and his only. Even my beauty failed to influence his selfish carelessness : but he is mine by a more potent spell. Love may be given in vain,— beauty may be powerless ; but I have mastered by the deeper magic of flattery.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
And had he not long read
Her heart's hush'd secret in the soft dark eye
Lighted at his approach, and on the cheek
Colouring all crimson at his lightest look?

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
We English people delight in a moral — not a moral to be deduced or inferred, but a nice, rounded, little moral, in all the starch of set sentences, and placed just at the end,

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
But these days
Of visible poetry have long been past!—
No fear that the young hunter may profane
The haunt of some immortal;

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Which is the best,—
Beauty and glory, in a southern clime,
Mingled with thunder, tempest ; or the calm
Of skies that scarcely change, which, at the least,
If much of shine they have not, have no storms?

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Death has most awful lessons ! It is sad,
Aye, strange, to see even the aged die ;
But about youth there is a confidence
In life, that makes it terrible.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Despair weeps not. Her lip moved as in prayer
Unconsciously ; as if prayers had been there,
And they moved now from custom.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
It is curious to observe how little one period resembles another. Centuries are the children of one mighty family, but here is no family-likeness between them.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
The gallantry of an English peasant rarely expands into words.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Youth's first acquaintance with sorrow is a terrible thing—before time has taught, what it will surely teach, that grief is our natural portion, at once transitory and eternal. But the first lesson is the severest—we have not then looked among our fellows, and seen that suffering is general ; and we feel as if marked out by fate for misery that has no parallel.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
'Tis something, if in absence we can see
The footsteps of the past:—it soothes the heart
To breathe the air scented in other years
By lips beloved; to wander through the groves
Where once we were not lonely,—

Letitia Elizabeth Landon