Sadness Quotes — page 22

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.

The common growth of Mother Earth Suffices me,—her tears, her mirth, Her humblest mirth and tears.

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky; The dew shall weep thy fall tonight, For thou must die.

Nothing speaks our Grief so well As to speak nothing

Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste.

Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time with a gift of tears, Grief with a glass that ran, Pleasure with pain for leaven, Summer with flowers that fell,

All my joys to this are folly Naught so sweet as melancholy.

Hence, loathèd Melancholy, Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born, In Stygian cave forlorn, 'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy.

Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade, Death came with friendly care; The opening bud to heaven conveyed, And bade it blossom there.

It is God's will that we have three things in our seeking: — The first is that we seek earnestly and diligently, without sloth, and, as it may be through His grace, without unreasonable heaviness and vain sorrow.

Alas, tears are the poet's heritage!

What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers May be heaven's distant lamps.

Sad as a wasted passion.

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers, Ere the sorrow comes with years? They are leaning their young heads against their mothers— And that cannot stop their tears.

Can I see another's woe, And not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, And not seek for kind relief?

Rough wind, the moanest loud Grief too sad for song; Wild wind, when sullen cloud Knells all the night long; Sad storm, whose tears are vain, Bare woods, whose branches strain,

"Come back! come back!" he cried in grief "Across this stormy water; And I'll forgive your Highland chief, My daughter! O my daughter!"

Time passes—Time the consoler—Time the anodyne—Time the grey calm satirist, whose sad smile seems to say, Look, O man, at the vanity of the objects you pursue, and of yourself who pursue them!

It is only to the happy that tears are a luxury.

She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

Forc'd from their homes, a melancholy train, To traverse climes beyond the western main; Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around, And Niagara stuns with thundering sound.

To Sorrow I bade good-morrow, And thought to leave her far away behind; But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly; She is so constant to me, and so kind:

What sorrow was, thou bad'st her know, And from her own she learned to melt at others' woe.

And as, in ethics, Evil is a consequence of Good, so, in fact, out of Joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.