Alfred Austin Quotes
-
There is no gardening without humility
-
So, timely you came, and well you chose, You came when most needed, my winter rose. From the snow I pluck you, and fondly press Your leaves 'twixt the leaves of my leaflessness.
-
Though my verse but roam the air And murmur in the trees, You may discern a purpose there, As in music of the bees.
-
We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden.
-
Have you never, when waves were breaking, watched children at sport on the beach, With their little feet tempting the foam-fringe, till with stronger and further reach Than they dreamed of, a billow comes bursting, how they turn and scamper and screech!
-
From sunny woof and cloudy weft Fell rain in sheets; so, to myself I hummed these hazard rhymes, and left The learned volume on the shelf.
-
Life seems like a haunted wood, where we tremble and crouch and cry.
-
Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.
-
Faded smiles oft linger in the face, While grief's first flakes fall silent on the heart!
-
A garden that one makes oneself becomes associated with one’s personal history and that of one’s friends, interwoven with one’s tastes, preferences and character and constitutes a sort of unwritten autobiography.
-
Thought, stumbling, plods Past fallen temples, vanished gods, Altars unincensed, fanes undecked, Eternal systems flown or wrecked; Through trackless centuries that grant To the poor trudge refreshment scant, Age after age, pants on to find A melting mirage of the mind.
-
Never did form more fairy thread the dance Than she who scours the hills to find it flowers; Never did sweeter lips chained ears entrance Than hers that move, true to its striking hours; No hands so white e'er decked the warrior's lance, As those which tend its lamp as darkness lours; And never since dear Christ expired for man, Had holy shrine so fair a sacristan.
-
He is dead already who doth not feel Life is worth living still.
-
Is life worth living? Yes, so long As Spring revives the year, And hails us with the cuckoo's song, To show that she is here.