“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!”

The Song of the Bell (1799)

Canto I, stanza 20.
The Lord of the Isles (1815)

Poem: Care for Thy Soul as Thing of Greatest Price http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/care-for-thy-soul-as-thing-of-greatest-price/

Source: Mrs. Dalloway

Savitri (1918-1950), Book One : The Book Of Beginnings
Context: An instant's visitor the godhead shone.
On life's thin border awhile the Vision stood
And bent over earth's pondering forehead curve.
Interpreting a recondite beauty and bliss
In colour's hieroglyphs of mystic sense,
It wrote the lines of a significant myth
Telling of a greatness of spiritual dawns,
A brilliant code penned with the sky for page.

The Road to the Sea, p. 284
2000s and posthumous publications, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)

Source: Snow

Japanese Death Poems. Compiled by Yoel Hoffmann. ISBN 978-0-8048-3179-6

On Time (1995) http://nielsenhayden.com/ontime.html at nielsenhayden.com, accessed May 9, 2014.
Context: My own personal theory is that this is the very dawn of the world. We're hardly more than an eyeblink away from the fall of Troy, and scarcely an interglaciation removed from the Altamira cave painters. We live in extremely interesting ancient times.
I like this idea. It encourages us to be earnest and ingenious and brave, as befits ancestral peoples; but keeps us from deciding that because we don't know all the answers, they must be unknowable and thus unprofitable to pursue.