Sidney Lanier

“ Thou seest and wilt not cover thine eyes; thou dost stand at the casement on a dewy morning, and sentimentalize over the birds that flit by: for thou knowest a worm died in pain at each bird song, and death sitteth in the dew; thou lookest through the rich lawn dresses of the witch women, thou lookest through the ledger-revelries of the merchant, thou seest quasi-religion which is hell-in-trifles before thee, thou seest superstition black about thee,—I have a word for thee. ”

“ And yet no man can be said to make the least success in life who does not contrive to make them go well together.
59The Age is an Adonis that pursues the boar Wealth: yet shall the rude tusk of trade wound this blue-veined thigh,—if Love come not to the rescue; Adon despises Love.
60Sometimes Providence seems to have a bee in his bonnet. Else why should hell, the greatest risk, be the most improvable fact, and himself, the only light, be the most completely undiscoverable? If the angels are good company, why shut us out from them? I look for good boys for my children. ”

“ I construct in my lonesome meditations the fairest scheme of my relations to my fellow-men, and to fellow-events; but when I go to set the words of solitary thought to the music of much-crowded action, I find ten thousand difficulties never suspected: difficulties of race, temperament, mood, tradition, custom, passion, unreason and other difficulties which I do not understand, as, for instance, the failure of contemporary men to recognize genius and great art. ”

“ Each union of self and self is, once for all, incest and adultery and every other crime. Let me alone. God made me so, a man, individual, unit, whole, fully-appointed in myself. Again I cry to thee, O friend, let me alone.
42The church having become fashionable is now grown crowded, and the Age will have to get up from its pew and go outside soon, if only for a little fresh air.
43You wish me to argue whether Paul had a revelation: I do not care greatly; I have had none, but roses, trees, music, and a running stream, and Sirius. ”

“ Science is big, and Time is a-throb,
Hold thy heart, Heart.
37Wan Silence lying lip on ground,
An outcast Angel from the Heaven of sound,
Prone and desolate
By the shut Gate. 38A poet is a perpetual Adam: events pass before him, like the animals in the creation, and he names them.
39"The Improvement of the Ground is the most Natural Obtaining of Riches: For it is our Great Mother's Blessing, the Earth: But it is slow." ”

“ Published September, 1908
v NOTE It requires but little intimacy with the true artist to see that, whether his medium of expression be words or music or the brush, much of his finest achievement can never be given to his fellows bearing the stamp of perfect craftsmanship. As when the painter, with hand momentarily inspired by the fervor of the eye, fixes in a sketch some miracle of color or line, which vanishes with each succeeding stroke of the brush laboring to embody it in a finished picture—so the poet may transcribe one note of his own tense heart strings ”

“ This is like opening a window of dark stained glass, and letting in a flood of white light. I thus keep upon the walls of my soul a church-wall rubric which has been somewhat clouded by the expiring breaths of creeds dying their natural death. For in art there is no doubt. ”

“ Good God, is it possible thou canst stop this wind which at this moment is mocking ten thousand babies and thin-clad mothers with the unimaginable anguish of cold—is it possible thou canst stop this, and wilt not? ”

“ Forever thro' the ferocities of storms, the malice of the never-glutted oceans, the savagery of human wars, the inexorable barbarities of accident, of earthquake and mysterious Disease, one hears the voice of man crying, where art thou, my dear Lord and Master? ”

“ And spreading odorous havoc o'er the green. 86All men are pearl-divers, and we have but plunged down into this straggling salt-sea of Life—to find a pearl. This Pearl, like all others, comes from a wound: it is the Pearl of Love after Grief.
87It is always sunrise and always sunset somewhere on the earth. And so, with a silver sunrise before him and a golden sunset behind him, the Royal Sun fares through Heaven, like a king with a herald and a retinue.
88Night's a black-haired poet, and he's in love with Day. ”

“ This melody is always moving along in the background of my spirit. 105If I wish to compose, I abstract my attention from the thoughts which occupy the front of the stage, the dramatis personæ of the moment, and fix myself upon the deeper scene in the rear.
106It is now time that one should arise in the world and cry out that Art is made for man and not man for art: that government is made for man and not man for government: that religion is made for man and not man for religion: that trade is made for man and not man for trade. ”

“ So many dreams brood over thee. 67To stand with quietude in the midst of the prodigious Unknown which we call the World, also to look with tranquil eyes upon the unfathomable blackness which limits our view to the little space enclosed betwixt birth and death. ”

“ Tears exhaling into smiles. 17A man does not reach any stature of manhood until like Moses he kills an Egyptian (i. e., murders some oppressive prejudice of the all-crushing Tyrant Society or Custom or Orthodoxy) and flies into the desert of his own soul, where among the rocks and sands, over which at any rate the sun rises dear each day, he slowly and with great agony settles his relation with men and manners and powers outside, and begins to look with his own eyes, and first knows the unspeakable joy of the outcast's kiss upon the hand of sweet, naked Truth. ”

“ It is as if an avalanche, in the very moment of crushing the kneeling villagers, should turn to a gentle and fruitful rain, and be minister not of death but of life.
81 A GARDEN PARTY Invitation brought by the wind, and sent by the rose and the oak. I sat on the steps—warm summer noon—in a garden, and half cloudy with low clouds, sun hot, rich mocking bird singing, bee brushing down a big raindrop from a flower, where it hung tremulous. The bird's music is echoed from the breasts of roses, and reflex sound comes doubly back with grace of odor.—First came the lizard, dandiest of reptiles ”

“ I am always more a man when I converse with you. Who is so manly and so manifold sweet as a tree? There is none that can talk like a tree: for a tree says always to me exactly that which I wish him to say. ”

“ The strongest, the wisest, the dearest, the sweetest. 77Come with me, Science; let us go into the Church here (say in Georgia) ; let alone the youth here, they have roses in their cheeks, they know that life is delicious, what need have they of thee? But fix thy keen eye on these grave-faced and mostly sallow married women who make at least half this congregation—these women who are the people that carry around the subscription cards, and feed the preacher and keep him in heart always. ”

“ It lives on meat. We never have an idea whose existence has not been purchased by the death of some atom of our fleshy tissue.
O little poem, thou goest from this brain chargeable with the death of tissue that perished in order that thou mightst live: nourish some soul, thou that hast been nourished on a human body. ”

“ Gold is a soft metal, but makes the hardest hauberk of all. What shall I do to pierce this covering? For I am hungry for this man, this business man of stocks and drygoods, and now it seems as if there were no pleasure nor hope nor life for me until I win him to my side. ”

“ Like vast green waves, white-foaming at the top. 90Hunger and a whip: with these we tame wild beasts. So, to tame us, God continually keeps our hearts hungry for love, and continually lashes our souls with the thongs of relentless circumstance. ”

“ But let not the young man go to killing his Egyptian too soon: wait till you know all the Egyptians can teach you: wait till you are master of the technics of the time; then grave, and resolute, and aware of consequences, shape your course. ”

“ Some are mere flashes of simile in unrhymed couplets; others are definite rounded outlines, instinct with the beauty of idea, but not yet hewn to the line of perfect form; one, at least, is the beginning of quite a long narrative in verse. ”

“ Against calamities we clearly know. 69It may be that the world can get along without God: but I can not. The universe-finity is to me like the chord of the dominant seventh, always leading towards, always inviting onwards, a Chord of Progress ”

“ How could the Jew who wrote Genesis have known the sadness that ever comes with learning—as if wisdom were still the protégé of the Devil.
97On the advantage of reducing facts—like fractions—to a common denominator.
We explain: but only in terms of x and y, which are themselves symbols of we know not what, graphs of mystery. We establish relations betwixt this and that mystery. We reduce x and y to a common denominator, so that we can add them together, and make a scientific generalization, or subtract them, and make a scientific analysis: but more we can not do. ”

“ B.—her husband has been a thriftless fellow, and she has finally found out the damnable fact that she is both stronger and purer than he is, which she is, however, yet sweetly endeavoring to hide from herself and all people ”