Quotes
Quotes about Light
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,--glittering like the morning star full of life and splendour and joy.... Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men,--in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded.
The men of England,--the men, I mean, of light and leading in England.
Lights of the world, and stars of human race.
How fleet is a glance of the mind!
Compared with the speed of its flight
The tempest itself lags behind,
And the swift-winged arrows of light.
For 't is a truth well known to most,
That whatsoever thing is lost,
We seek it, ere it come to light,
In every cranny but the right.
In this fool's paradise he drank delight.
Misled by fancy's meteor ray,
By passion driven;
But yet the light that led astray
Was light from heaven.
And like a passing thought, she fled
In light away.
The golden hours on angel wings
Flew o'er me and my dearie;
For dear to me as light and life
Was my sweet Highland Mary.
Macaulay is like a book in breeches.... He has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.
Men who prefer any load of infamy, however great, to any pressure of taxation, however light.
A simple child
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
That blessed mood,
In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened.
A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,--
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
As high as we have mounted in delight,
In our dejection do we sink as low.
A remnant of uneasy light.
She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight,
A lovely apparition, sent
To be a moment's ornament;
Her eyes as stars of twilight fair,
Like twilights too her dusky hair,
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful dawn.
A light to guide, a rod
To check the erring, and reprove.
Give unto me, made lowly wise,
The spirit of self-sacrifice;
The confidence of reason give,
And in the light of truth thy bondman let me live!
The light that never was, on sea or land;
The consecration, and the Poet's dream.
Blessings be with them, and eternal praise,
Who gave us nobler loves, and nobler cares!--
The Poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays.
At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
But thou that didst appear so fair
To fond imagination,
Dost rival in the light of day
Her delicate creation.
If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright,
Go visit it by the pale moonlight.
