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

R. H. Stoddard

A voice of greeting from the wind was sent;

The mists enfolded me with soft white arms;

The birds did sing to lap me in content,

The rivers wove their charms,—

And every little daisy in the grass

Did look up in my face, and smile to see me pass!

Around our pillows golden ladders rise,

And up and down the skies,

With winged sandals shod,

The angels come, and go, the messengers of God!

Nor, though they fade from us, do they depart—

It is the childly heart:

We walk as heretofore,

Adown their shining ranks, but see them nevermore.

Children are the keys of Paradise;

They alone are good and wise,

Because their thoughts, their very lives, are prayer.

Day is the Child of Time,

And Day must cease to be:

But Night is without a sire,

And cannot expire,

One with Eternity.

Divinest Autumn! who may paint thee best,

Forever changeful o’er the changeful globe?

Who guess thy certain crown, thy favorite crest,

The fashion of thy many-colored robe?

England, our mother’s mother! Come and see

A greater England here! O come and be

At home with us, your children, for there runs

The same blood in our veins as in your sons;

The same deep-seated love of liberty

Beats in our hearts. We speak the same good tongue;

Familiar with all songs your bards have sung,

Those large men, Milton, Shakespeare, both are ours.

Heaven is not gone, but we are blind with tears,

Groping our way along the downward slope of years!

I am not alone,

For solitude like this is populous,

And its abundant life of sky and sun,

High-floating clouds, low mists, and wheeling birds,

And waves that ripple shoreward all day long,

Whether the tide is setting in or out,

Forever rippling shoreward, dark and bright,

As lights and shadows, and the shifting winds

Pursue each other in their endless play,

Is more than the companionship of man.

I loved the Clouds.

Fire-fringed at dawn, or red with twilight bloom,

Or stretched above, like isles of leaden gloom

In heaven’s vast deep, or drawn in belts of gray,

Or dark blue walls along the base of day;

Or snow-drifts luminous at highest noon,

Ragged and black in tempests, veined with lightning,

And when the moon was brightening,

Impearled and purpled by the changeful moon.

I loved the Wind.

Whether it kissed my hair and pallid brow;

Whether with sweets my sense it fed, as now;

Whether it blew across the scudding main;

Whether it shrieked above a stretch of plain;

Whether, on autumn days, in solemn woods,

And barren solitudes,

Along the waste it whirled the withered leaves;

Whether it hummed around my cottage eaves,

And shook the rattling doors,

And died with long-drawn sighs, on bleak and dreary moors;

Whether in winter, when its trump did blow

Through desolate gorges dirges of despair,

It drove the snow-flakes slantly down the air,

And piled the drifts of snow;

Or whether it breathed soft in vernal hours,

And filled the trees with sap, and filled the grass with flowers.

If there is anything that will endure

The eye of God because it still is pure,

It is the spirit of a little child,

Fresh from His hand, and therefore undefiled.

Nearer the gate of Paradise than we,

Our children breathe its airs, its angels see;

And when they pray God hears their simple prayer,

Yea, even sheathes His sword, in judgment bare.

Let me silent be;

For silence is the speech of love,

The music of the spheres above.

Men can be great when great occasions call:

In little duties women find their spheres,

The narrow cares that cluster round the hearth.

Not that the heavens the little can make great,

But many a man has lived an age too late.

O wretched state of kings! doleful fate!

Greatness misnamed, in misery only great!

Could men but know the endless woe it brings,

The wise would die before they would be kings.

Think what a king must do! It tasks the best

To rule the little world within his breast,

Yet must he rule it, and the world beside,

Or king is none, undone by power and pride.

Think what a king must be! What burdens bear

From birth to death! His life is one long care.

It wears away in tasks that never end.

He has ten thousand foes, but not one friend.

Summer of winter, day or night,

The woods are an ever-new delight;

They give us peace, and they make us strong,

Such wonderful balms to them belong:

So, living or dying, I’ll take mine ease

Under the trees, under the trees.

Tell me what is sorrow? It is a garden-bed.

And what is joy? It is a little rose,

Which in that garden grows.

The misty earth below is wan and drear,

The baying winds chase all the leaves away,

As cruel hounds pursue the trembling deer;

It is a solemn time, the sunset of the year.

The trumpet winds have sounded a retreat,

Blowing o’er land and sea a sullen strain;

Usurping March, defeated, flies again,

And lays his trophies at the Winter’s feet.

And lo! where April, coming in his turn,

In changeful motleys, half of light and shade,

Leads his belated charge, a delicate maid,

A nymph with dripping urn.

The wild November comes at last

Beneath a veil of rain;

The night wind blows its folds aside,

Her face is full of pain.

The latest of her race, she takes

The Autumn’s vacant throne:

She has but one short moon to live,

And she must live alone.

There is no death. The thing that we call death

Is but another, sadder name for life.

There is no hope—the future will but turn

The old sand in the falling glass of time.

We grow like flowers, and bear desire,

The odor of the human flowers.

Given the books of a man, it is not difficult, I think, to detect therein the personality of the man, and the station in life to which he was born.

We love in others what we lack ourselves, and would be everything but what we are.

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