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

Moon

Like a great phantom slowly sweeping through the sky.

Tennyson.

The silver empress of the night.

Tickell.

The silver-footed queen.

Milton.

Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.

Hawthorne.

The maiden moon in her mantle of blue.

Joaquin Miller.

Ye moon and stars, bear witness to the truth.

Dryden.

O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon.

Shakespeare.

The moon, like to a silver bow new bent in heaven.

Shakespeare.

The full-orb’d moon with her nocturnal ray
Shed o’er the scene a lovely flood of day.

Wheelwright.

Waning moons their settled periods keep, to swell the billows and ferment the deep.

Addison.

Day glimmered in the east, and the white moon hung like a vapor in the cloudless sky.

Rogers.

The queen of night shines fair with all her virgin stars about her.

Otway.

It is the very error of the moon; she comes more near earth than she was wont, and makes men mad.

Shakespeare.

That orbed maiden, with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon.

Shelley.

The young moon has fed
Her exhausted horn
With the sunset’s fire.

Shelley.

O! moon old boughs lisp forth a holier din,
The while they feel thine airy fellowship:
Thou dost bless everywhere with silver lip,
Kissing dead things to life.

John Keats.

Cynthia, fair regent of the night, oh, may thy silver lamp from heaven’s high bower direct my footsteps in the midnight hour.

Gay.

How like a queen comes forth the lonely Moon
From the slow opening curtains of the clouds;
Walking in beauty to her midnight throne!

George Croly.

The silver light, which, hallowing tree and tower,
Sheds beauty and deep softness o’er the whole,
Breathes also to the heart, and o’er it throws
A loving languor which is not repose.

Byron.

And be their rest unmov’d
By the white moonlight’s dazzling power:
None, but the loving and belov’d,
Should be awake at this sweet hour.

Moore.

Still and pale
Thou movest in thy silver veil,
Queen of the night! the filmy shroud
Of many a mild, transparent cloud
Hides, yet adorns thee.

Praed.

***now glow’d the firmament
With living sapphires; Hesperus, that led
The starry host rode brightest, till the Moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length,
Apparent queen, unveil’d her peerless light,
And o’er the dark her silver mantle threw.

Milton.

The moon, the governess of floods, pale in her anger, washes all the air, that rheumatic diseases do abound; and, through this distemperature, we see the seasons alter.

Shakespeare.

See yonder fire! It is the moon
Slow rising o’er the eastern hill.
It glimmers on the forest tips,
And through the dewy foliage drips
In little rivulets of light,
And makes the heart in love with night.

Longfellow.

Like the young moon,
When on the sunlit limits of the night
Her white shell trembles amid crimson air,
And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might,
Doth, as the herald of its coming, bear
The ghost of its dead mother, whose dim form
Bends in dark ether from her infant’s chair.

Shelley.

Now through the passing cloud she seems to stoop,
Now up the pure cerulean rides sublime.
Wide the pale deluge floats, and streaming mild
O’er the sky’d mountain to the shadowy vale,
While rocks and floods reflect the quivering gleam
The whole air whitens with a boundless tide
Of silver radiance, trembling round the world.

Thomson.

Soon as the evening shades prevail,
The moon takes up the wondrous tale,
And nightly to the listening earth
Repeats the story of her birth;
Whilst all the stars that round her burn,
And all the planets in their turn
Confirm the tidings as they roll,
And spread the truth from pole to pole.

Addison.

The cold chaste Moon, the Queen of Heaven’s bright isles,
Who makes all beautiful on which she smiles!
That wandering shrine of soft, yet icy flame,
Which ever is transform’d yet still the same,
And warms, but not illumines.

Shelley.

I know not that there is anything in nature more soothing to the mind than the contemplation of the moon, sailing, like some planetary bark, amidst a sea of bright azure. The subject is certainly hackneyed: the moon has been sung by poet and poetaster. Is there any marvel that it should be so?

Simms.

The rising moon has hid the stars,
Her level rays, like golden bars
Lie on the landscape green,
With shadows brown between,
And silver white the river gleams,
As if Diana, in her dreams,
Had dropt her silver bow
Upon the meadows low.

Longfellow.

The Queen of night, whose large command
Rules all the sea, and half the land,
And over moist and crazy brains,
In high spring-tides, at midnight reigns,
Was now declining to the west,
To go to bed, and take her rest.

Butler.

Beholding the moon rise
Over the pallid sea and the silvery mist of the meadows:
Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossom’d the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.

Longfellow.

My own lov’d light,
That very soft and solemn spirit worships,
That lovers love so well—strange joy is thine,
Whose influence o’er all tides of soul hath power,
Who lend’st thy light to rapture and despair;
The glow of hope and wan hue of sick fancy
Alike reflect thy rays: alike thou lightest
The path of meeting or of parting love—
Alike on mingling or on breaking hearts
Thou smil’st in throned beauty!

Maturin.

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