Richard Henry Stoddard Quotes

All Love is Beauty, and all Beauty—Love!

We have two lives about us,
Two worlds in which we dwell;
Within us, and without us, Alternate Heaven and Hell:
Without, the somber Real,
Within our hearts of hearts, the beautiful Ideal!

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

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.

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

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.

Silence is the speech of love,
The music of the spheres above.

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

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?

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

There are gains for all our losses,
There are balms for all our pain:
But when youth, the dream, departs,
It takes something from our hearts,
And it never comes again.

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!

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.

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.