C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Bayard Taylor

And half in shade and half in sun;

The rose sat in her bower,

With a passionate thrill in her crimson heart.

And rest, that strengthens unto virtuous deeds,

Is one with Prayer.

Bathed in the tenderest purple of distance,

Tinted and shadowed by pencils of air,

Thy battlements hang o’er the slopes and the forests,

Seats of the Gods in the limitless ether,

Looming sublimely aloft and afar.

Because the gift of Song was chiefly lent,

To give consoling music for the joys

We lack, and not for those which we possess.

But still I dream that somewhere there must be

The spirit of a child that waits for me.

Dead is the air, and still! the leaves of the locust and walnut

Lazily hang from the boughs, inlaying their intricate outlines

Rather on space than the sky—on a tideless expansion of slumber.

Death is not rare, alas! nor burials few,

And soon the grassy coverlet of God

Spreads equal green above their ashes pale.

Departed suns their trails of splendor drew

Across departed summers: whispers came

From voices, long ago resolved again

Into the primeval Silence, and we twain,

Ghosts of our present selves, yet still the same,

As in a spectral mirror wandered there.

Each separate star

Seems nothing, but a myriad scattered stars

Break up the night, and make it beautiful.

Fame is what you have taken,

Character’s what you give;

When to this truth you waken,

Then you begin to live.

He teaches best,

Who feels the hearts of all men in his breast,

And knows their strength or weakness through his own.

Higher than the perfect song

For which love longeth,

Is the tender fear of wrong,

That never wrongeth.

I love thee, I love but thee,

With a love that shall not die

Till the sun grows cold,

And the stars are old,

And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!

Love’s history, as Life’s, is ended not

By marriage.

Our life is scarce the twinkle of a star

In God’s eternal day.

Sleep, soldiers! still in honored rest

Your truth and valor wearing:

The bravest are the tenderest,—

The loving are the daring.

Sometimes an hour of Fate’s serenest weather

Strikes through our changeful sky its coming beams;

Somewhere above us, in elusive ether,

Waits the fulfillment of our dearest dreams.

Sweeter than the stolen kiss

Are the granted kisses.

The clouds are scudding across the moon,

A misty light is on the sea;

The wind in the shrouds has a wintry tune,

And the foam is flying free.

The knowledge of my sin

Is half-repentance.

The Poet’s leaves are gathered one by one,

In the slow process of the doubtful years.

“The Prophet’s words were true;

The mouth of Ali is the golden door

Of Wisdom,”

When his friends to Ali bore

These words, he smiled and said: “And should they ask

The same until my dying day, the task

Were easy; for the stream from Wisdom’s well,

Which God supplies, is inexhaustible.”

The source of each accordant strain

Lies deeper than the Poet’s brain.

First from the people’s heart must spring

The passions which he learns to sing;

They are the wind, the harp is he,

To voice their fitful melody,—

The language of their varying fate,

Their pride, grief, love, ambition, hate,—

The talisman which holds inwrought

The touchstone of the listener’s thought;

That penetrates each vain disguise,

And brings his secret to his eyes.

The stream from Wisdom’s well,

Which God supplies, is inexhaustible.

The woods appear

With crimson blotches deeply dashed and crossed,—

Sign of the fatal pestilence of Frost.

There may come a day

Which crowns Desire with gift, and Art with truth,

And Lore with bliss, and Life with wiser youth!

They sang of love and not of fame;

Forgot was Britain’s glory;

Each heart recalled a different name,

But all sang “Annie Laurie.”

’Twas glory once to be a Roman;She makes it glory, now, to be a man.

Yonder fly his scattered golden arrows,

And smite the hills with day.

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

By wisdom wealth is won; but riches purchased wisdom yet for none.

Eccentricity is developed monomania.

For life lives only in success.

Labor, you know, is prayer.

Life lives only in success.

Love’s humility is love’s true pride.

Mock jewelry on a woman is tangible vulgarity.

Next to ye both I love the palm, with his leaves of beauty, his fruit of balm.

Not many but good books.

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

Pardon, not wrath, is God’s best attribute.

Peace the offspring is of power.

Pens carry further than rifled cannon.

Shelved around us lie the mummied authors.

Swelling in anger or sparkling in glee.

The glories of the possible are ours.

The maxims tell you to aim at perfection, which is well; but it’s unattainable, all the same.

The most annoying of all blockheads is a well-read fool.

The poet’s leaves are gathered one by one, in the slow process of the doubtful years.

Those who would attain to any marked degree of excellence in a chosen pursuit must work, and work hard for it, prince or peasant.

To learn by observation is traveling, people must also bring knowledge with them.

To Truth’s house there is a single door, which is experience.

Women are not apt to be won by the charms of verse.

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