Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Quotes about life (page 4)

“Can loveliness lose its power? Ah, yes! when love can lose its truth. Weak and impetuous, yielding to temptation, but trembling to enjoy the reward of the committed crime; such is the man of whom my heart made its divinity, — for whose sake I would have toiled as a slave; ay, and do; but with far other aim now. Let us but once meet again, Jehanghire, and thou art mine! but I — I can never be thine again. Life, throne, fortunes, we will yet share together; but my heart, never, never more!”

“I do love violets:
They tell the history of woman's love;
They open with the earliest breath of spring;
Lead a sweet life of perfume, dew, and light;
And, if they perish, perish with a sigh
Delicious as that life.”

“How I pity those whose childhood has been unhappy! to them one of the sweetest springs of feeling has been utterly denied, the most green and beautiful part of life laid waste.”

“Life has little breathing time; and, even when we do for a moment reflect, it is rather on our present than our past : the pains and pleasures of memory are put aside as quickly as the poem which celebrates them.”

“I kiss'd her lips: oh, God, the chill!
My heart is frozen with it still:—
It was as suddenly on me
Open'd my depths of misery.
I flung me on the ground, and raved,
And of the wind that past me craved
One breath of poison, till my blood
From lip and brow gush'd in one flood.
I watch'd the warm stream of my veins
Mix with the death wounds clotted stains;
Oh! how I pray'd that I might pour
My heart's tide, and her life restore!”

“A letter then, breathing of home and affection, is a treasure; it is like a memento from the dead, for absence is as death in all but that its resurrection is in this life.”

“Glorious and beautiful
Were youth's feeling and youth's thought—
Would that we did not annul
All that in us then was wrought!
Would their influence could remain
When the hope and dream depart;
Would we might through life retain
Still some youth within the heart!”

“… happiness is not for this world — a conviction that cannot be too soon acquired : it will destroy a thousand vain expectations, dissipate the most perplexing of our illusions — the early knowledge that life is but a trial, whose triumph is hereafter, and this earth a place appointed for that sorrow and patient endurance which is gradually fitting us for a better and a happier state.”

“We might have been! — these are but common words,
And yet they make the sum of life's bewailing;”

“The past is the poet's,—that world is his own;
Thence hath his music its truth and its tone.
He calls up the shadows of ages long fled,
And light, as life lovely, illumines the dead.”

“Oh, there are evil moments in our life,
When but a thought, a word, a look, has power
To dash the cup of happiness aside,
And stamp us wretched!”

“Farewell, and when to-morrow
Seems little, like to-day,
And we find life's deepest sorrow
Melts gradual away;
Yet do not quite forget me.”

“The clouds, and not the stars, to them
The omen and the sign be given—
The clouds, the vapours of our soil,
Not stars, whose element is heaven.
The deepening shade, the flitting light,
Mark what each coming month will know—
The passing joy, the constant care,
Of life's sad pilgrimage below.”

“Ah! love and song are but a dream,
A flower's faint shade on life's dark stream.”

“For his was now the loveliest part
Of the young poet's life, when first,
In solitude and silence nurst,
His genius rises like a spring
Unnoticed in its wandering;
Ere winter cloud or summer ray
Have chill'd, or wasted it away”

“The influence of a woman's first love is felt on her whole after-existence: never can she dream such dream again. For a woman there is no second-love—youth, hope, belief, are all given to her first attachment; if unrequited, the heart becomes its own Prometheus, creative, ideal, but with the vulture preying upon it for ever.—If deceived, the whole poetry of life is gone; the very essence of poetry is belief, and how can she, whose sweet eager credulity has once learnt the bitter truth—that its reliance was in vain, how can she ever believe again?”

“To this fine spirit our earth owes her greatest:
For the future is purchased by scorning the present,
And life is redeemed from its clay soil by fame.
* King, not a vestige remains of your palaces;
Conqueror, forgotten the fame of your battles:
But the Poet yet lives in the sweetness of music—
He appeal'd to the heart, that never forgets.”

“There is a deep impression of awe produced by such a vast but silent crowd; we are at once conscious that the cause is terrible which can induce the unusual stillness. The issue of a trial on which hangs life or death, is indeed an appalling thing. We know that men are about to take away that which they cannot give—that a few words of human breath will deprive of breath one of the number for ever; and though we acknowledge that in this evil world punishment is the only security against crime, and that blood for blood has been a necessity from the beginning of time; still, we feel that the necessity is a dreadful one.”

“I own that I have known greater misfortunes in life than that a young gentleman and lady of twenty should have to wait a twelve-month before they were married; but every person considers their own the worst that ever happened…”