Letitia Elizabeth Landon Quotes

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I cannot love evergreens - they are the misanthropes of nature. To them the spring brings no promise, the autumn no decline; they are cut off from the sweetest of all ties with their kind - sympathy.... I will have no evergreens in my garden; when the inevitable winter comes, every beloved plant and favorite tree shall drop together - no solitary fir left to triumph over the companionship of decay.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
How often, in this cold and bitter world, is the warm heart thrown back upon itself! Cold, careless, are we of another's grief; we wrap ourselves in sullen selfishness.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
… what could have brought him to Dalton. There were no chalybeate-springs, warranted to cure every disease under the sun; no ruins in the neighbourhood, left expressly for antiquarians and pic-nic parties; no fine prospects, which, like music, people make it matter of conscience to admire; no celebrated person had ever been born or buried in its environs; there were no races, no assizes—in short, there was no nothing."

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
She spoke, they were but a few hurried words —
Of the sweet flowers around, the heat, the night —
Yet were they such as the blest heart records
For many an after-moment's long delight ;
They touch'd upon his spirit's inmost chords ;
Though broken was the sense, the accents light,
Yet sweeter was to him that tremulous tone
Than all that eloquence were proud to own.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
What a falsehood it is to say that genius and industry are incompatible ! Does one work of genius exist that has not also been a work of labour ?

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
On this subject any general rule is impossible ; love, like the chamelion, is coloured by the air in which it lives — and the finer the air the richer the colour. Some young ladies have a happy facility of falling in and out of love; their heart, like a raspberry tart, is covered with crosses.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Nothing more strongly marks the insufficiency of luxuries than the ease with which people grow accustomed to them; they are rather known by their want than by their presence. The word 'blasé' has been coined expressly for the use of the upper classes.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
I own that I have known greater misfortunes in life than that a young gentleman and lady of twenty should have to wait a twelve-month before they were married; but every person considers their own the worst that ever happened…

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Good and evil ! good and evil ! ye are mingled inextricably in the web of our being ; and who may unthread the darker yarn ?

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Religion has no limits, and no bounds;—
The vast, the infinite, and the eternal.,
Never from her may Genius separate.
Imagination from its earliest flight,
Past o'er the bounds of life : and the sublime
Is the reflection of divinity.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Out upon the folly which, in estimating human misery, allows aught to bear comparison with the agony of the poor ! I use the word poor relatively; I call not those poor to whom honesty brings self-respect, whose habits and whose means have gone together, and whose industry is its own support. But those are the poor whose exertion supplies not their wants—to whom cold, hunger, and weariness, are common feelings ; who have known better days—to whom the past furnishes contrast, and the future fear.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
O dream of fame, what hast thou been to me
But the destroyer of life's calm content!

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Literature soon becomes a power, not what it once was, a passion; but literary success, like all others, is only to be obtained, and retained, by labour — and labour and inclination do not always go together. Take all our most eminent writers, and the quantity of work, hard work, they have got through, will be found enormous and perpetual. Literature, as a profession, allows little leisure, and less indulgence.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
The sweetest and best qualities of our nature may be turned to evil, by the strong force of circumstance and of temptation.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Oh, glory of the morning!
Oh, ye gifted, young, and brave!
What end have ye, but midnight;
What find ye but the grave ?

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
We would liken music to Aladdin's lamp—worthless in itself, not so for the spirits which obey its call. We love it for the buried hopes, the garnered memories, the tender feelings, it can summon with a touch.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
What was our parting ?—one wild kiss,
How wild I may not say,
One long and breathless clasp, and then
As life were past away.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
It is the mistake of a coxcomb, whose experience of affection is all to come—if it ever comes—to say that women are won by mere good looks. Though it does not owe its birth to them. Gratitude and Vanity are the nurses that rock the cradle of Love.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Spirit of the midnight dream,
What is now upon thy wing ?
Earth sleeps in the moonlight beam ;
O'er that sleep what wilt thou fling ?

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
I dread the pictures of my dreams,
For, then I gaze on thee;
And thou art near, and thou art all
That I would have thee be.
And then I startle from my sleep,
And know all false, and watch and weep.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
There grew her father's cypress tree,
No other monument had he.
He bade that never funeral stone
Should tell of glory overthrown,—
What could it say, but foreign sky
Had seen the exile pine and die?

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Another year, another year, —
Alas! and must it be
That Time's most dark and weary wheel
Must turn again for me?

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Oh never another dream can be
Like that early dream of ours,
When the fairy Hope lay down to sleep,
Like a child, among the flowers.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Ah ! I appeal to all who have any sensibility — for themselves — how delightful it is to be called in the morning, yet not to obey that call. It combines two of the greatest enjoyments of which our nature is susceptible— obstinacy and indolence.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
There is a flower, a magical flower,
On which love hath laid a fairy power ;
Gather it on the eve of St. John,
When the clock of the village is tolling one ;
Let no look be turned, no word be said,
And lay the rose-leaves under your head ;
Your sleep will be light, and pleasant your rest,
For your visions will be of the youth you love best.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
God ! that this Earth should be so beautiful,
And yet so wretched !

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
I'm weary, I'm weary,—this cold world of ours;
I will go dwell afar, with fairies and flowers.
....
I'm weary, I'm weary,—I'm off with the wind:
Can I find a worse fate than the one left behind?

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
The moon is darkened in the sky
As if grief 's shade were passing by;

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
She leant her head upon her hand : I know not which to choose—
Alas ! whichever choice I make, the other I must lose.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon
How can they say confiding is relief?
Light are the woes that to the eyelids spring,
Subdued and soften'd by the tears they bring;
But there are some too long, too well conceal'd,
Too deeply felt,—that are but once reveal'd:
Like the withdrawing of the mortal dart,
And then the life-blood follows from the heart;
Sorrow, before unspoken by a sigh,
But which, once spoken, only hath to die.—

Letitia Elizabeth Landon