Great Throughts Treasury

"I saw how all the trembling ages past, molded to her by deep and deeper breath, neared to the hour when Beauty breathes her last and knows herself in death."

"I remember once quarreling with Yeats who was walking around the room with a sword in one hand muttering spells to ward off evil spirits, and I noticed that every time he passed a plate of plums he put down his unoccupied hand and took a plum and I said, 'Yeats, you cannot evoke great spirits and eat plums at the same time.""

"I pitied one whose tattered dress was patched, and stained with dust and rain; he smiled on me; I could not guess the viewless spirit's wide domain."

"I sometimes think a mighty lover takes every burning kiss we give: his lights are those which round us hover: for him alone our lives we live."

"If the Gods would only inspire me a little more vigorously I would write no end, but as it is I have to sweat over my work, such as it is, and often groan that I never have a chance to do it properly."

"I thought, beloved, to have brought to you a gift of quietness and ease and peace, cooling your brow as with the mystic dew dropping from twilight trees. Homeward I go not yet; the darkness grows; not mine the voice to still with peace divine: from the first fount the stream of quiet flows through other hearts than mine. Yet of my night I give to you the stars, and of my sorrow here the sweetest gains, and out of hell, beyond its iron bars, my scorn of all its pains."

"In ancient shadows and twilights where childhood had strayed, the world’s great sorrows were born and its heroes were made."

"Image of beauty, when I gaze on thee, trembling I waken to a mystery, how through one door we go to life or death by spirit kindled or the sensual breath."

"In day from some titanic past it seems as if a thread divine of memory runs; born ere the Mighty One began his dreams, or yet were stars and suns."

"In the fire of love we live, or pass by many ways, by unnumbered ways of dream to death."

"It was the fairy of the place, moving within a little light, who touched with dim and shadowy grace the conflict at its fever height. It seemed to whisper 'Quietness,' then quietly itself was gone: yet echoes of its mute caress were with me as the years went on."

"It was the wise all-seeing soul who counseled neither war nor peace: 'Only be thou thyself that goal in which the wars of time shall cease.'"

"It was the warrior within who called 'Awake, prepare for fight: yet lose not memory in the din: make of thy gentleness thy might: 'Make of thy silence words to shake the long-enthroned kings of earth: make of thy will the force to break their towers of wantonness and mirth.'"

"Its edges foamed with amethyst and rose, withers once more the old blue flower of day: there where the ether like a diamond glows its petals fade away."

"Let me dream only with my heart, love first, and after see: know thy diviner counterpart before I kneel to thee. So in thy motions all expressed thy angel I may view: I shall not on thy beauty rest, but Beauty's ray in you."

"Let thy young wanderer dream on: call him not home. A door opens, a breath a voice from the ancient room, speaks to him now. Be it dark or bright he is knit with his doom."

"Life cannot utter words more great than life may meet by sacrifice, high words were equaled by high fate, you paid the price. You paid the price."

"Love's immortality so blind dreams that all things with it conjoined must share with it immortal day: but not of this—but not of this— the touch, the eyes, the laugh, the kiss, fall from it and it goes its way."

"Now the quietude of earth nestles deep my heart within; friendships new and strange have birth since I left the city's din."

"Not unremembering we pass our exile from the starry ways: one timeless hour in time we caught from the long night of endless days."

"Nearer to Thee, not by delusion led, though there no house fires burn nor bright eyes gaze, we rise, but by the symbol charioted, through loved things rising up to Love's own ways by these the soul unto the vast has wings and sets the seal celestial on all mortal things."

"Now when the spirit in us wakes and broods, filled with home yearnings, drowsily it flings from its deep heart high dreams and mystic moods, mixed with the memory of the loved earth things; clothing the vast with a familiar face; reaching its right hand forth to greet the starry race."

"O'er the fields of space together following her flying traces, in a radiant tumult thronging, suns and stars and myriad races mount the spirit spires of beauty, reaching onward to the day when the Shepherd of the Ages draws his misty hordes away through the glimmering deeps to silence, and within the awful fold life and joy and love forever vanish as a tale is told, lost within the mother's being. So the vision flamed and fled, and before the glory fallen every other dream lay dead."

"Oh real as in dream all this; and then a hand on mine is laid: the wave of phantom time withdraws; and that young Babylonian maid, one drop of beauty left behind from all the flowing of that tide, is looking with the self-same eyes, and here in Ireland by my side. Oh, light our life in Babylon, but Babylon has taken wings, while we are in the calm and proud procession of eternal things."

"Oh, I am so old, me seems I am next of kin to Time, the historian of her dreams from the long forgotten prime."

"Of the Earth, of the Mother, my heart with her heart in accord: as I lie mid the cool green tresses that mantle her breast I begin with the grass once again to be bound to the Lord."

"On the laugh of a child I am borne to the joy of the King."

"Only in the self we grope to the misty end of time: truth has put an end to hope. What of all the heart to love? Sadder than for will or soul, no light lured it on above; Love has found itself the whole."

"Our love was so vast that it filled the heavens up: but the soft white form I held was an empty cup, when the willows called me back to earth with their sigh, and we moved as shades through the deep that was you and I."

"Only in clouds and dreams I felt those souls in the abyss, each fire hid in its clod, from which in clouds and dreams the spirit rolls into the vast of God."

"Search for the high austere and lonely way the Spirit moves in through eternities. Ah, in the soul what memories arise! And with what yearning inexpressible, rising from long forgetfulness I turn to Thee, invisible, unrumoured, still: white for Thy whiteness all desires burn. Ah, with what longing once again I turn!"

"Pain and penitence forsaking, hearts like cloisters dim and grey, by your laughter lured, awaking join with you the dance of day."

"Sacred thy laughter on the air, Holy thy lightest word that fell, proud the innumerable hair that waved at the enchanter's spell. Oh Master of the Beautiful, creating us from hour to hour, give me this vision to the full to see in lightest things thy power! This vision give, no heaven afar, no throne, and yet I will rejoice, knowing beneath my feet a star, Thy word in every wandering voice."

"Our true hearts are forever lonely: a wistfulness is in our thought: our lights are like the dawns which only seem bright to us and yet are not."

"Sirs, I address this warning to you, the aristocracy of industry in this city, because, like all aristocracies, you tend to grow blind in long authority, and to be unaware that you and your class and its every action are being considered and judged day by day by those who have power to shake or overturn the whole social order, and whose restlessness in poverty today is making our industrial civilization stir like a quaking bog. You do not seem to realise that your assumption that you are answerable to yourselves alone for your actions in the industries you control is one that becomes less and less tolerable in a world so crowded with necessitous life."

"Silence and coolness now the earth enfold: jewels of glittering green, long mists of gold, hazes of nebulous silver veil the height, and shake in tremors through the shadowy night. Heard through the stillness, as in whispered words, the wandering God-guided wings of birds ruffle the dark. The little lives that lie deep hid in grass join in a long-drawn sigh more softly still; and unheard through the blue the falling of innumerable dew, lifts with grey fingers all the leaves that lay burned in the heat of the consuming day."

"Something you see in me I was not: another heart in you I guess: a stranger's lips — but thine I kiss not, erring in all my tenderness."

"Still as the holy of holies breathes the vast within its crystal depths the stars grow dim; fire on the altar of the hills at last burns on the shadowy rim. Moments that holds all moments; white upon the verge it trembles; then like mists of flowers break from the fairy fountain of the dawn the hues of many hours."

"The ancient deep and fade therein, enraptured, bright and blind."

"The blue dusk ran between the streets; my love was winged within my mind; it left to-day and yesterday and thrice a thousand years behind. To-day was past and dead for me for from to-day my feet had run through thrice a thousand years to walk the ways of ancient Babylon."

"The great deep thrills for through it everywhere the breath of beauty blows."

"The conception of yourselves as altogether virtuous and wronged is, I assure you, not at all the one which onlookers hold of you. No doubt, you have rights on your side. No doubt, some of you suffered without just cause. But nothing which has been done to you cries aloud to Heaven for condemnation as your own actions."

"The hope lives on age after age, Earth with its beauty might be won for labor as a heritage, for this has Ireland lost a son."

"The life which passes mourns its wasted hour. And, ah, to think how thin the veil that lies between the pain of hell and paradise!"

"The relation of landlord and tenant is not an ideal one, but any relations in a social order will endure if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy, which qualifies life for immortality. Despotisms endure while they are benevolent, and aristocracies while noblesse oblige is not a phrase to be referred to with a cynical smile. Even an oligarchy might be permanent if the spirit of human kindness, which harmonizes all things otherwise incompatible, is present."

"The grey road whereupon we trod became as holy ground: the eve was all one voice that breathed its message with no sound: and burning multitudes pour through my heart, too bright, too blind, too swift and hurried in their flight to leave their tale behind."

"The tower of heaven turns darker blue; a starry sparkle now begins; the mystery and magnificence, the myriad beauty and the sins come back to me."

"The lights grew thicker unheeded, for silent and still were we; our hearts were drunk with a beauty our eyes could never see."

"The twilight fleeted away in pearl on the stream, and night, like a diamond dome, stood still in our dream."

"The offerings arise: hazes of rainbow light, pure crystal, blue, and gold, through dreamland take their flight; and 'mid the sacrifice God moveth as of old. In miracles of fire He symbols forth his days; in gleams of crystal light reveals what pure pathways lead to the soul's desire, the silence of the height."