Thomas Bailey Aldrich Quotes

After a debauch of thunder-shower, the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow.

I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.

My dear Mr. Morse: It was very pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don't think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and the signature (which I guessed at). There's a singular and a perpetual charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, it never loses its novelty. One can say to one's self every morning: "There's that letter of Morse's. I haven't read it yet. I think I'll take another shy at it to-day, and maybe I shall be able in the course of a few years to make out what he means by those t's that look like w's and those i's that haven't any eyebrows." Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever—unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.

There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.

In her eyes a thought
Grew sweet and sweeter, deepening like the dawn—
A mystical forewarning!

Dear Lord, though I be changed to senseless clay.
And serve the potter as he turns his wheel,
I thank thee for the precious gift of tears!

What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.

Books that have become classics—books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal—always remind me of venerable colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.

What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round.

It is only your habitual late riser who takes in the full flavor of Nature at those rare intervals when he gets up to go a-fishing. He brings virginal emotions and unsatiated eyes to the sparkling freshness of earth and stream and sky.

Somewhere—in desolate wind-swept space— In Twilight-land—in No-man’s land—
Two hurrying Shapes met face to face, And bade each other stand. “And who are you?” cried one, a-gape, Shuddering in the gloaming light.
“I know not,” said the second Shape, “I only died last night!”

If you chance to live in a town where the authorities cannot rest until they have destroyed every precious tree within their blighting reach, you will be especially charmed by the beauty of the streets of Portsmouth. In some parts of the town, when the chestnuts are in blossom, you would fancy yourself in a garden in fairyland.

Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct shadows to the generations following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

So precious life is! Even to the old The hours are as a miser’s coins!