Richard Henry Stoddard Quotes

Joy may be a miser, But Sorrow’s purse is free.

Children are the keys of Paradise. … They alone are good and wise,
Because their thoughts, their very lives, are prayer.

Not what we would, but what we must, Makes up the sum of living;
Heaven is both more and less than just In taking and in giving.

Heaven is not gone, but we are blind with tears,
Groping our way along the downward slope of Years!

All Love is Beauty, and all Beauty—Love!

Day and night my thoughts incline
To the blandishments of wine:
Jars were made to drain, I think,
Wine, I know, was made to drink!

A voice of greeting from the wind was sent,
The mists enfolded me with soft white arms,
The birds did sing to lap me in content,
The rivers wove their charms,
And every little daisy in the grass
Did look into my face and smile to see me pass.

It beckons, I follow. Good by to the light!
I am going, oh! whither? Out into the night!

I have been sojourning late
Among the pleasant places of my Past,
The green and quiet neighborhoods of Thought,
In which I wandered in my wayward youth;
With no companion but the constant Muse,
Who sought me when I needed her—ah when
Did I not need her, solitary else?

There is no death—the thing that we call death
Is but another, sadder name for life,
Which is itself an insufficient name,
Faint recognition of that unknown Life—
That Power whose shadow is the Universe.

Gains for all our losses

There are gains for all our losses
There are balms for all our pains
But when youth the dream departs
It takes some thing from our hearts
And never comes again

We are stronger and are better
Under manhood’s sterner reign
Still we feel that some thing sweet
Followed youth with flying feet
And will never come again.

Some thing beautiful has vanished
And we sigh for it in vain
We behold it every where — —
On the earth and in the air — —
But it never comes again.

Pale in her fading bowers the Summer stands,
Like a new Niobe with claspèd hands,
Silent above the flowers, her children lost,
Slain by the arrows of the early frost.

A face at the window, A tap on the pane:
Who is it that wants me To-night in the rain?

We love in others what we lack ourselves,
And would be every thing but what we are.

Once when the days were ages,
And the old Earth was young,
The high gods and the sages
From Nature's golden pages
Her open secrets wrung.
Each questioned each to know
Whence came the Heavens above, and whence the Earth below.