Praise follows truth afar off, and only overtakes her at the grave; plausibility clings to her skirts and holds her back till then.
The thing we long for, that we are For one transcendent moment.
The future works out great men’s destinies; The present is enough for common souls, Who, never looking forward, are indeed Mere clay wherein the footprints of their age Are petrified forever.
Humbleness is always grace; always dignity.
O chime of sweet Saint Charity, Peal soon that Easter morn When Christ for all shall risen be, And in all hearts new-born! That Pentecost when utterance clear To all men shall be given, When all shall say My Brother here, And hear My Son in heaven!
Fanaticism, or, to call it by its milder name, enthusiasm, is only powerful and active so long as it is aggressive. Establish it firmly in power, and it becomes conservatism, whether it will or no.
Tiny Salmoneus of the air His mimic bolts the firefly threw.
The fireflies o’er the meadow In pulses come and go.
May is a pious fraud of the almanac A ghastly parody of real Spring Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind.
And the choice goes by forever ’twixt that darkness and that light.
I don’t believe in princerple, But oh I du in interest.
Aspiration sees only one side of every question; possession many.
The snow had begun in the gloaming, and busily all the night had been heaping field and highway with a silence deep and white.
A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity.
Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it; We are happy now because God wills it.
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.
In vain we call old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing; The Ten Commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing.
The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and to be buried in.
Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.
Heaven is neither here nor there to me. Everywhere and nowhere. Just not in between, But I believe in Heaven.