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

Water

The rising world of waters dark and deep.

Milton.

Water its living strength first shows,
When obstacles its course oppose.

Goethe.

Honest water, which ne’er left man in the mire.

Shakespeare.

Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep.

Shakespeare.

Water is the mother of the vine,
The nurse and fountain of fecundity,
The adorner and refresher of the world.

Chas. Mackay.

Here quench your thirst, and mark in me
An emblem of true charity;
Who, while my bounty I bestow,
Am neither seen, nor heard to flow.

Hone.

Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

Coleridge.

Traverse the desert, and then ye can tell
What treasures exist in the cold deep well,
Sink in despair on the red parch’d earth,
And then ye may reckon what water is worth.

Miss Eliza Cook.

Till taught by pain,
Men really know not what good water’s worth:
If you had been in Turkey or in Spain,
Or with a famish’d boat’s crew had your berth,
Or in the desert heard the camel’s bell,
You’d wish yourself where truth is—in a well.

Byron.

’Tis a little thing
To give a cup of water: yet its draught
Of cool refreshment, drain’d by feverish lips,
May give a thrill of pleasure to the frame
More exquisite than when nectarian juice
Renews the life of joy in happiest hours.

Thos. Noon Talfourd.

’Tis rushing now adown the spout,
And gushing out below,
Half frantic in its joyousness,
And wild in eager flow.
The earth is dried and parched with heat,
And it hath long’d to be
Released from out the selfish cloud,
To cool the thirsty tree.

Elizabeth Oakes Smith.

How beautiful the water is!
To me ’tis wondrous fair—
No spot can ever lonely be
If water sparkle there:
It hath a thousand tongues of mirth,
Of grandeur, or delight,
And every heart is gladder made
When water greets the sight.

Mrs. E. Oakes Smith.

A cup of cold Adam from the next purling stream.

Tom Brown.

How sweet from the green mossy brim to receive it,
As, poised on the curb, it inclined to my lips!
Not a full blushing goblet could tempt me to leave it,
The brightest that beauty or revelry sips.

Samuel Woodworth.

More water glideth by the mill
Than wots the miller of.

Shakespeare.

Smooth to the shelving brink, a copious flood
Rolls fair and placid, where collected all
In one impetuous torrent, down the steep
It thund’ring shoots, and shakes the country round.
At first an azure sheet it rushes broad,
Then whitening by degrees, as prone it falls,
And from the loud resounding rocks below,
Dash’d in a cloud of foam, it sends aloft
A hoary mist, and forms a ceaseless shower.
Nor even the torrid wave here finds repose,
But raging still amid the shaggy rocks,
Now flashes o’er the scatter’d fragments now
Aslant the hollow’d channel rapid darts,
And falling fast from gradual slope to slope,
With wild infracted course and lessen’d roar
It gains a safer bed, and steals at last
Along the mazes of the quiet vale.

Thomson.

The fall of waters! rapid as the light,
The flashing mass foams shaking the abyss;
The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss,
And boil in endless torture; while the sweat
Of their great agony, wrung out from this
Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet
That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set,
And mounts in spray the skies, the thence again
Returns in an unceasing shower, which round,
With its unemptied clouds of gentle rain,
Is an eternal April to the ground,
Making it all one emerald:—how profound
The gulf! and how the giant element
From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound,
Crushing the cliffs, which, downward worn and rent
With his fierce footsteps, yield in chasms a fearful vent
To the broad column which rolls on.

Byron.

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