Thomas Bailey Aldrich Quotes

64 Sourced Quotes

Nature, who loves to do a gentle thing even in her most savage moods, had taken one of those empty water-courses and filled it from end to end with forget-me-nots.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Between the reputation of the author living and the reputation of the same author dead there is ever a wide discrepancy.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
The fair, frail palaces,
The fading alps and archipelagoes,
And great cloud-continents of sunset-seas.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
A mighty wind, like a leviathan,
Ploughed through the brine, and from these solitudes
Sent Silence frightened.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
That was indeed to live—
At one bold swoop to wrest
From darkling death the best
That Death to Life can give!

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Somewhere—in desolate wind-swept space—
In Twilight-land—in No-man's land—
Two hurrying Shapes met face to face,
And bade each other stand.

And who are you? cried one, agape,
Shuddering in the gloaming light.
I know not, said the second Shape,
I only died last night.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Hebe's here, May is here!
The air is fresh and sunny;
And the miser-bees are busy
Hoarding golden honey.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
The Summer comes and the Summer goes;
Wild-flowers are fringing the dusty lanes,
The shallows go darting through fragrant rains,
Then, all of a sudden — it snows.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Or light or dark, or short or tall,
She sets a springe to snare them all:
All's one to her—above her fan
She'd make sweet eyes at Caliban.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
In her eyes a thought
Grew sweeter and sweeter, deepening like the dawn, —
A mystical forewarning.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
October turned my maple's leaves to gold;
The most are gone now; here and there one lingers;
Soon these will slip from out the twig's weak hold,
Like coins between a dying miser's fingers.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct shadows to the generations following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
It was pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don't think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and the signature (which I guessed at).

There's a singular and a perpetual charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, it never loses its novelty... Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever - unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
When to soft Sleep we give ourselves away,
And in a dream as in a fairy bark
Drift on and on through the enchanted dark
To purple daybreak — little thought we pay
To that sweet bitter world we know by day.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
In street and alley, what strange tongues are loud, Accents of menace alien to our air, Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew! O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well To leave the gates unguarded?

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
When I behold what pleasure is pursuit,
What life, what glorious eagerness it is,
Then mark how full possession falls from this,
How fairer seems the blossom than the fruit, —
I am perplext, and often stricken mute,
Wondering which attained the higher bliss,
The winged insect, or the chrysalis
It thrust aside with unreluctant foot.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
With the tears a Land hath shed. Their graves should ever be green.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
What probing deep
Has ever solved the mystery of sleep?

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
So precious life is! Even to the old
The hours are as a miser's coins!

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
These Winter nights against my window-pane
Nature with busy pencil draws designs
Of ferns and blossoms and fine spray of pines,
Oak-leaf and acorn and fantastic vines,
Which she will make when summer comes again —
Quaint arabesques in argent, flat and cold,
Like curious Chinese etchings.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
All the panes are hung with frost
Wild wizard-work of silver lace.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
What thought is folded in thy leaves!
What tender thought, what speechless pain!
I hold thy faded lips to mine,
Thou darling of the April rain.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Day is a snow-white Dove of heaven
That from the East glad message brings:
Night is a stealthy, evil Raven,
Wrapt to the eyes in his black wings.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Books that have become classics—books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal—always remind me of venerable colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired upon half pay.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
No bird has ever uttered note That was not in some first bird's throat; Since Eden's freshness and man's fall No rose has been original.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
It is the Lord's Day, and I do believe that cheerful hearts and faces are not unpleasant in His sight.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich