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

Joaquin Miller

The east is blossoming! Yea, a rose,

Vast as the heavens, soft as a kiss,

Sweet as the presence of woman is,

Rises and reaches, and widens and grows

Large and luminous up from the sea,

And out of the sea, as a blossoming tree,

Richer and richer, so higher and higher,

Deeper and deeper it takes its hue;

Brighter and brighter it reaches through

The space of heaven and the place of stars,

Till all is as rich as a rose can be,

And my rose-leaves fall into billows of fire.

Better sit still where born, I say,

Wed one sweet woman and love her well.

(Love and be loved in the old East way,

Drink sweet waters, and dream in a spell,

Than to wander in search of the Blessed Isles,

And to sail the thousands of watery miles

In search of love, and find you at last

On the edge of the world, and a curs’d outcast.

Death is delightful. Death is dawn—

The waking from a weary night

Of fevers unto truth and light.

Fame lulls the fever of the soul, and makes

Us feel that we have grasp’d an immortality.

God’s poet is silence! His song is unspoken,

And yet so profound, so loud, and so far,

It fills you, it thrills you with measures unbroken,

And as soft, and as fair, and as far as a star.

Lo! darkness bends down like a mother of grief

On the limitless plain, and the fall of her hair

It has mantled a world.

O woman, born first to believe us;

Yea, also born first to forget;

Born first to betray and deceive us,

Yet first to repent and regret.

The gold-barr’d butterflies to and fro

And over the waterside wander’d and wove

As heedless and idle as clouds that rove

And rift by the peaks of perpetual snow.

They are fair resting-places

For the dear weary dead on their way up to heaven.

Time eftsoon will tumble

All of us together like leaves in a gust,

Humbled indeed down into the dust.

’Tis midnight now. The bent and broken moon,

Batter’d and black, as from a thousand battles,

Hangs silent on the purple walls of Heaven.

’Tis morn. Behold the kingly Day now leaps

The eastern wall of earth with sword in hand,

Clad in a flowing robe of mellow light,

Like to a king that has regain’d his throne,

He warms his drooping subjects into joy,

That rise rejoiced to do him fealty,

And rules with pomp the universal world.

Under the storm and the cloud to-day,

And to-day the hard peril and pain—

To-morrow the stone shall be rolled away,

For the sunshine shall follow the rain.

Merciful Father, I will not complain,

I know that the sunshine shall follow the rain.

I rest content, I kiss your eyes, I kiss your hair in my delight; I kiss my hand and say good-night.

Men lie, who lack courage to tell truth—the cowards!

Men mighty-thewed as Samson was, dark-browed as kings in iron cast, broad-breasted as twin gates of brass.

Men say, “By pride the angels fell from heaven.” By pride they reached a place from which they fell.

Physiognomy is often a great falsifier, though as a rule it is honest enough.

Soul-deep eyes of darkest night.

The living grave of crime.

The maiden moon in her mantle of blue.

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