Quotes
Quotes about Wit
The heart ran o'er
With silent worship of the great of old!
The dead but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.
Which makes life itself a lie,
Flattering dust with eternity.
I am the very slave of circumstance
And impulse,--borne away with every breath!
Heart on her lips, and soul within her eyes,
Soft as her clime, and sunny as her skies.
Divine in hookas, glorious in a pipe
When tipp'd with amber, mellow, rich, and ripe;
Like other charmers, wooing the caress
More dazzlingly when daring in full dress;
Yet thy true lovers more admire by far
Thy naked beauties--give me a cigar!
So for a good old-gentlemanly vice
I think I must take up with avarice.
And her face so fair
Stirr'd with her dream, as rose-leaves with the air.
These two hated with a hate
Found only on the stage.
A lovely being, scarcely formed or moulded,
A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded.
Friendship is Love without his wings.
What say you to such a supper with such a woman?
I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,
With vassals and serfs at my side.
Come to the bridal chamber, Death!
Come to the mother's, when she feels
For the first time her first-born's breath!
Come when the blessed seals
That close the pestilence are broke,
And crowded cities wail its stroke!
Come in consumption's ghastly form,
The earthquake shock, the ocean storm!
Come when the heart beats high and warm,
With banquet song, and dance, and wine!
And thou art terrible!--the tear,
The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier,
And all we know or dream or fear
Of agony are thine.
They love their land because it is their own,
And scorn to give aught other reason why;
Would shake hands with a king upon his throne,
And think it kindness to his Majesty.
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest,
With his martial cloak around him.
Slowly and sadly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,
But we left him alone with his glory.
With hue like that when some great painter dips
His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse.
O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth.
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.
That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the moon.
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Peter was dull; he was at first
Dull,--oh so dull, so very dull!
Whether he talked, wrote, or rehearsed,
Still with this dulness was he cursed!
Dull,--beyond all conception, dull.
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Sing again, with your dear voice revealing
A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.
Heaven's ebon vault
Studded with stars unutterably bright,
Through which the moon's unclouded grandeur rolls,
Seems like a canopy which love has spread
To curtain her sleeping world.
