Alfred Austin

Winter is gone, and spring is over. The cuckoo-flowers grow mauver and mauver

The most generous of critics, if he is to be discriminating and just, cannot, let me say again, allow that any verse which is profoundly obscure or utterly unmusical, no matter how intellectual in substance, deserves the appellation of …

Imagination in Poetry, as distinguished from mere Fancy, is the transfiguring of the Real, or actual, into the Ideal.

[N]o verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as Poetry, whatever other qualities it may possess.

[I]n all periods of transitional thought and belief the conscience suffers, since its old sanctions have been removed and none other have yet taken their place. It is undermined without being adequately propped up.

Women are more frequently charming than men, because they are less self-conscious.

[C]harm appertains to the essence of the person or thing endowed with it. It cannot be acquired, it cannot be got rid of, and its results are produced without effort, since the person who has it cannot help producing them.

People living and dead, things past and present, all are contributories to that diminutive stream, oneself; a reflection which is essentially consoling, since it associates one with the sum of things and prevents one from living in barren …

Doth logic in the lily hide, And where's the reason in the rose?

If Man makes Conscience, then being good Is only being worldly wise, And universal brotherhood A comfortable compromise.

Where in the lily lurks the mind, Where in the rose discern the soul?More mindless still, stream, pasture, lake; The mountains yet more heartless seem. […]It is their silence that appals, Their aspect motionless that awes, When searching …

[W]henever one wants to cite something wise and true, one has to go either to the ancients or to the eighteenth century for it.

English maidens are, in certain respects, to Italian maidens as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine.

One can put up with, indeed more than put up with, a certain amount of technical carelessness in Poetry, provided it be in other respects of a very high order, as not unoften, for instance, in Shakespeare and Byron. But similar blemishes …

He was an Englishman of Englishmen, of the old school of charming manners, flavoured by occasional downrightness of speech.

He was not far wrong who said that, for choice, he would be a beautiful woman from seventeen to thirty, a successful General from thirty to fifty, and a Cardinal for the rest of his days. But of course he was thinking of Cardinals as they …

A little knowledge is said to be a dangerous thing, but it is not dangerous to the imagination. Knowledge is to the imagination what fuel is to flame. A little feeds it; a great deal extinguishes it.

[T]he Caesars of this world act sagaciously, perhaps, in making as much of their purple as possible. The world is largely governed by tailors and upholsterers.

Hospitality should be accidental, spontaneous, and impulsive, not pre-arranged and calculated.

A person of the right sort is one who has a solid grasp and realistic apprehension of people and things as they are, an irresistible inclination to transfigure them according to his imagination, and an inexhaustible supply of philosophic …

To homes pervaded by charm, as to works of Art that approach perfection, the more happily constituted minds say 'Yes' without any qualification. The proper homage due to them is absolute assent.

[T]he charm of a half-neglected old garden arises from its having, once upon a time, not been neglected.

All imitation is exaggeration.

Goodnight! Now dwindle wan and low The embers of the afterglow, And slowly over leaf and lawn Is twilight's dewy curtain drawn.