He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1499/
Variant: I have spread my dreams under your feet.
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Source: The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
Context: Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with the golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
“Those sculptur'd halls my feet shall never tread,
Where varnish'd vice and vanity combin'd,
To dazzle and seduce, their banners spread,
And forge vile shackles for the free-born mind.”
Ode to Independence, antistrophe 3.
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Tobias Smollett 11
18th-century poet and author from Scotland 1721–1771Related quotes
Forty, l. 29-32.
Ballads for the Times (1851)
From a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith (June 23, 1926)
Letters
“My song shall spread where ever there are men,
If wit and art will so much guide my pen.”
Cantando espalharei por toda parte,
Se a tanto me ajudar o engenho e arte.
Stanza 2, lines 7–8 (tr. Richard Fanshawe, 1655)
Epic poetry, Os Lusíadas (1572), Canto I
As quoted in "Giordano Bruno" by Thomas Davidson, in The Index Vol. VI. No. 36 (4 March 1886), p. 429
“Those things are inextricable bound up in my mind, with words I make an image and vice versa.”
As quoted in Boekgrrls (8 March 2004) http://www.boekgrrls.nl/BgDiversen/Onderwerpen/gedichten_over_schilderijen.htm
“vanity, like all social vices, craves for novelty;”
Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)