Bayard Taylor Quotes

I envy those old Greek bathers, into whose hands were delivered Pericles, and Alcibiades, and the perfect models of Phidias. They had daily before their eyes the highest types of Beauty which the world has ever produced; for of all things that are beautiful, the human body is the crown.

The lamp you lighted in the olden time Will show you my heart’s-blood beating through the rhyme: A poet’s journal, writ in fire and tears… Then slow deliverance, with the gaps of years.

Melrose is the finest remaining specimen of Gothic architecture in Scotland. Some of the sculptured flowers in the cloister arches are remarkably beautiful and delicate, and the two windows – the south and east oriels – are of a lightness and grace of execution really surprising.

Really,’ thought I, ‘we call Baltimore the ‘Monumental City’ for its two marble columns, and here is Edinburg with one at every street-corner!

We follow and race In shifting chase, Over the boundless ocean-space! Who hath beheld when the race begun? Who shall behold it run?

Oh! what waves of crime and bloodshed have swept like the waves of a deluge down the valley of the Rhine! War has laid his mailed hand on those desolate towers and ruthlessly torn down what time has spared, yet he could not mar the beauty of the shore, nor could Time himself hurl down the mountains that guard it.

And far and wide, in a scarlet tide, The poppy’s bonfire spread.

Pens carry further than rifled cannon.

The healing of the world is in its nameless saints. Each separate star seems nothing, but a myriad scattered stars break up the night and make it beautiful.

Departed suns their trails of splendor drewAcross departed summers: whispers cameFrom voices, long ago resolved againInto the primeval Silence, and we twain,Ghosts of our present selves, yet still the same,As in a spectral mirror wandered there.

When May, with cowslip-braided locks,Walks through the land in green attire.And burns in meadow-grass the phloxHis torch of purple fire:And when the punctual May arrives,With cowslip-garland on her brow,We know what once she gave our lives,And cannot give us now!

The aquilegia sprinkled on the rocksA scarlet rain; the yellow violetSat in the chariot of its leaves, the phloxHeld spikes of purple flame in meadows wet,And all the streams with vernal-scented reedWere fringed, and streaky bellow of miskodeed.