Robert Bridges Quotes

Beauty, the eternal Spouse of the Wisdom of God
and Angel of his Presence thru' all creation.

Nature hav no music; nor would ther be for thee
any better melody in the April woods at dawn
than what an old stone-deaf labourer, lying awake
o'night in his comfortless attic, might perchance
be aware of, when the rats run amok in his thatch?

I know
that if odour were visible as colour is, I'd see
the summer garden aureoled in rainbow clouds.

The broad cloud-driving moon in the clear sky
Lifts o’er the firs her shining shield,
And in her tranquil light
Sleep falls on forest and field.
See! sleep hath fallen: the trees are asleep:
The night is come. The land is wrapt in sleep.

They gathered up the crystal manna to freeze
Their tongues with tasting, their hands with snowballing;
Or rioted in a drift, plunging up to the knees.

So sweet love seemed that April morn,
When first we kissed beside the thorn,
So strangely sweet, it was not strange
We thought that love could never change.

And Reason kens he herits in
A haunted house. Tenants unknown
Assert their squalid lease of sin
With earlier title than his own.

Awake! the land is scattered with light, and see,
Uncanopied sleep is flying from field and tree.

I live on hope and that I think do all
Who come into this world.

Surely thy body is thy mind,
For in thy face is nought to find,
Only thy soft unchristened smile,
That shadows neither love nor guile.

Man's Reason is in such deep insolvency to sense,
that tho' she guide his highest flight heav'nward, and teach him
dignity morals manners and human comfort,
she can delicatly and dangerously bedizen
the rioting joys that fringe the sad pathways of Hell.

The storm is over, the land hushes to rest:
The tyrannous wind, its strength fordone,
Is fallen back in the west.

For beauty being the best of all we know
Sums up the unsearchable and secret aims
Of nature.

Seeking unceasingly for the First Cause of All,
in question for what special purpose he was made,
Man, in the unsearchable darkness, knoweth one thing:
that as he is, so was he made; and if the Essence
and characteristic faculty of humanity
is our conscient Reason and our desire of knowledge,
that was Nature's Purpose in the making of man.

My delight and thy delight
Walking, like two angels white,
In the gardens of the night.