Alfred Austin Quotes

Who once has doubted never quite believes.

The most generous of critics, if he is to be discriminating and just, cannot, let me say again, allow that any verse which is profoundly obscure or utterly unmusical, no matter how intellectual in substance, deserves the appellation of poetry. But on a very thin thread of meaning poetry, or a very fair imitation of it, may be hung by the aid of musical sound.

Let Will but set its appetite on war,
And Reason will promptly invent offence,
And furnish blood with arguments.

Life seems like a haunted wood, where we tremble and crouch and cry.

Death is master of lord and clown.
Close the coffin and hammer it down.

Lo, where huge London, huger day by day,
O'er six fair counties spreads its hideous sway.

Friendship craves
The commerce of the mind, not the exchange
Of emulous feasts that foster sycophants.

No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.

[T]here is no gardening without humility, an assiduous willingness to learn, and a cheerful readiness to admit that you were mistaken. Nature is continually sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.

[I]n all periods of transitional thought and belief the conscience suffers, since its old sanctions have been removed and none other have yet taken their place. It is undermined without being adequately propped up.

There is no office in this needful world
But dignifies the doer if done well.

[E]xclusiveness in a garden is a mistake as great as it is in society.

[C]harm appertains to the essence of the person or thing endowed with it. It cannot be acquired, it cannot be got rid of, and its results are produced without effort, since the person who has it cannot help producing them.

He was an Englishman of Englishmen, of the old school of charming manners, flavoured by occasional downrightness of speech.

Goodnight! Now dwindle wan and low
The embers of the afterglow,
And slowly over leaf and lawn
Is twilight's dewy curtain drawn.