Longfellow Quotes

“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”
― Helen Bevington, When Found, Make a Verse of

“Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals or forts.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“There was an old belief that in the embers
Of all things their primordial form exists,
And cunning alchemists
Could re-create the rose with all its members
From its own ashes, but without the bloom,
Without the lost perfume
Ah me! what wonder-working, occult science
Can from the ashes in our hearts once more
The rose of youth restore?
What craft of alchemy can bid defiance
To time and change, and for a single hour
Renew this phantom-flower?”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“O, how wonderful is the human voice! It is indeed the organ of the soul! The intellect of man sits enthroned visibly upon his forehead and in his eye; and the heart of man is written upon his countenance. But the soul reveals itself in the voice only; as God revealed himself to the prophet of old in the still, small voice; and in a voice from the burning bush. The soul of man is audible, not visible. A sound alone betrays the flowing of the eternal fountain, invisible to man!”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion

“All those who perish in the wrath of God
  Here meet together out of every land;
And ready are they to pass o'er the river,
  Because celestial Justice spurs them on,
  So that their fear is turned into desire.
This way there never passes a good soul;
  And hence if Charon doth complain of thee,
  Well mayst thou know now what his speech imports.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“They ended up at the Old Corner Bookstore, which Brian had read about in a tour guide to Boston. "Longfellow and Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes used to read here. Let's go in." Brian nudged the girls until they obeyed.

It was a regular bookstore, less history-minded than Brian had expected. In fact, the local history shelves were quite mangeable. I'll buy one book, he thought. This will get me launched in actual reading. Out of the zillions of choices, I'll find one here.

Brian picked out Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. It was thick and somehow exciting, with its chapter headings and scholarly notes and bibliography.”
― Caroline B. Cooney

“The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst.”
― Clifton Fadiman, Clifton Fadiman's Fireside Reader

“All praise and honor! I confess
That bread and ale, home-baked, home-brewed
Are wholesome and nutritious food,
But not enough for all our needs;
Poets-the best of them-are birds
Of passage; where their instinct leads
They range abroad for thoughts and words
And from all climes bring home the seeds
That germinate in flowers or weeds.
They are not fowls in barnyards born
To cackle o'er a grain of corn;
And, if you shut the horizon down
To the small limits of their town,
What do you but degrade your bard
Till he at last becomes as one
Who thinks the all-encircling sun
Rises and sets in his back yard?”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time In misery”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“So Nature deals with us, and takes
away
Our playthings one by one, and by the
hand
Leads us to rest.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Eschew the skylark and the nightingale, birds that Audubon never found. A national literature ought to be built, as the robin builds its nest, out of the twigs and straws of one's native meadows.”
― Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England

“Cosí s'osserva in me lo contrapasso. (Thus is observed in me the counterpoise)”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.

From my study I see in the lamplight,
Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Children's Hour and Other Poems Paul Revere's Ride and Other Poems 1894 [Leather Bound]

“It is no secret I tell you, nor am I ashamed to declare it: I have liked to be with you, to see you, to speak with you always.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“twas now the hour that turneth back desire
In those who sail the sea, and melts the heart,
The day they've said to their sweet friends farewell,
And the new pilgrim penetrates with love,
If he doth hear from far away a bell
That seemeth to deplore the dying day”
― Dante Alighieri