“Calm on the bosom of thy God,
Fair spirit, rest thee now!”
Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) English poet
The Siege of Valencia (1823), scene ix, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
St. 7
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1816)
Context: The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past; there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth
Descended, to my onward life supply
Its calm, to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,
Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.
“Calm on the bosom of thy God,
Fair spirit, rest thee now!”
Felicia Hemans (1793–1835) English poet
The Siege of Valencia (1823), scene ix, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“Sudden thy silent beauty on me shone,
Fair as the moon had given thee all her spell.”
Francis William Bourdillon (1852–1921) British poet
"Sonnet I" in The Galaxy Vol. XIX, (January - June 1875), p. 747.
Context: Sudden thy silent beauty on me shone,
Fair as the moon had given thee all her spell.
Then, as Endymion had found on earth,
In unchanged beauty but in fashion changed,
Her whom I loved so long; so felt I then,
Not that a new love in my heart had birth,
But that the old, that far from reach had ranged,
Was now on earth, and to be loved of men.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist
(28th February 1824) Metrical Tales. Tale I. The Three Wells - A Fairy Tale
The London Literary Gazette, 1824
Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825) English author
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 433.
Joaquin Miller (1837–1913) American judge
Epigraph, Ch. 1 : Mount Shasta; this appears as "To Mount Shasta" in In Classic Shades, and Other Poems (1890), p. 126
Variant: I saw the lightning's gleaming rod
Reach forth and write upon the sky
The awful autograph of God.
This variant was cited as being in The Ship in the Desert in the 10th edition of Familiar Quotations (1919) by John Bartlett, but this appears to be an incorrect citation of a misquotation first found in The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (1910), edited by Elizabeth Bislande, p. 161.
Shadows of Shasta (1881)
Context: Where storm-born shadows hide and hunt
I knew thee, in thy glorious youth,
And loved thy vast face, white as truth;
I stood where thunderbolts were wont
To smite thy Titan-fashioned front,
And heard dark mountains rock and roll;
I saw the lightning's gleaming rod
Reach forth and write on heaven's scroll
The awful autograph of God!
John Calvin book Institutes of the Christian Religion
Book 3, Chapter 2, Section 25, p. 479
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)
Yehuda he-Hasid (1140–1217) German philosopher
Shir Hakovod, trans. from the Hebrew by Israel Zangwill
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist
A Night in May
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)
Joel Barlow (1754–1812) American diplomat
The Conspiracy of Kings (1792)
Context: In every clime, thy visage greets my eyes,
In every tongue thy kindred accents rise;
The thought expanding swells my heart with glee,
It finds a friend, and loves itself in thee. Say then, fraternal family divine,
Whom mutual wants and mutual aids combine,
Say from what source the dire delusion rose,
That souls like ours were ever made for foes;
Why earth's maternal bosom, where we tread,
To rear our mansions and receive our bread,
Should blush so often for the face she bore,
So long be drench'd with floods of filial gore;
Why to small realms for ever rest confin'd
Our great affections, meant for all mankind.
Though climes divide us; shall the stream or sea,
That forms a barrier 'twixt my friend and me,
Inspire the wish his peaceful state to mar,
And meet his falchion in the ranks of war? Not seas, nor climes, nor wild ambition's fire
In nations' minds could e'er the wish inspire;
Where equal rights each sober voice should guide,
No blood would stain them, and no war divide.
'Tis dark deception, 'tis the glare of state,
Man sunk in titles, lost in Small and Great;
'Tis Rank, Distinction, all the hell that springs
From those prolific monsters, Courts and Kings.