Great Throughts Treasury

"What is ambition? It is a glorious cheat! Angels of light walk not so dazzlingly the sapphire walls of heaven."

"Woe for my vine-clad home, that it should ever be so dark to me, with its bright threshold and its whispering tree!"

"Your love in a cottage is hungry, Your vine is a nest for flies-- Your milkmaid shocks the Graces, and simplicity talks of pies! You lie down to your shady slumber and wake with a bug in your ear, any your damsel that walks in the morning is shod like a mountaineer."

"'Tis a bird I love, with its brooding note, and the trembling throb in its mottled throat; there's a human look in its swelling breast, and the gentle curve of its lowly crest; and I often stop with the fear I feel-- He runs so close to the rapid wheel."

"Vulgarity is more obvious in satin than in homespun."

"We may believe that we shall know each other's forms hereafter; and in the bright fields of the better land call the lost dead to us."

"There they stand, the innumerable stars, shining in order like a living hymn, written in light."