This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Songs of Innocence (Introduction) - Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he laughing said to me: ‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’ So I piped with merry cheer. ‘Piper, pipe that song again;’ So I piped; he wept to hear. ‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe; Sing thy songs of happy cheer:’ So I sang the same again, While he wept with joy to hear. ‘Piper, sit thee down and write In a book, that all may read.’ So he vanish’d from my sight, And I pluck’d a hollow reed, And I made a rural pen, And I stain’d the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear.
Angels | Comfort | Darkness | Day | Death | Eternal | Family | Grave | Heaven | Joy | Light | Little | Mother | Nature | Silence | Sin | Sorrow | Soul | Sound | Space | Spirit | Tears | Thinking | Woman | World | Youth | Youth |
Earth’s Answer - Earth rais’d up her head From the darkness dread and drear. Her light fled, Stony dread! And her locks cover’d with grey despair. ‘Prison’d on wat’ry shore, Starry Jealousy does keep my den: Cold and hoar, Weeping o’er, I hear the Father of the Ancient Men. ‘Selfish Father of Men! Cruel, jealous, selfish Fear! Can delight, Chain’d in night, The virgins of youth and morning bear? ‘Does spring hide its joy When buds and blossoms grow? Does the sower Sow by night, Or the ploughman in darkness plough? ‘Break this heavy chain That does freeze my bones around. Selfish! vain! Eternal bane! That free Love with bondage bound.’
Fury |
A conversion is incomplete if it does not leave one with an intense social consciousness, if it does not fill one with a sense of overwhelming responsibility for the world. It has been said... truly that the Church exists for those outside of itself. The Church must never be in any sense a little huddle of pious people, shutting their doors against the world, lost in prayer and praise, connoisseurs of preaching and liturgy, busy mutually congratulating themselves on the excellence of their experience.
Nothing |
I looked for my soul but my soul I could not see. I looked for my God but my God eluded me. I looked for a friend and then I found all three.
Artifice | Children | Death | Earth | Experience | God | Light | Love | Man | Men | Patience | Price | Prosperity | Prudence | Prudence | Wife | Wisdom | God |
Will Rogers, fully William Penn Adair "Will" Rogers
Here's another way of putting it. Roosevelt wants recovery to start at the bottom. In other words, by a system of high taxes, he wants business to help the little fellow to get started and get some work, and then pay business back by buying things when he's at work. Business says, 'Let everybody alone. Let business alone, and quit monkeying with us, and we'll get everything going for you, and if we prosper, naturally the worker will prosper. That's exactly what business says, and they're justified from their angle in saying that.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.
Willa Cather, fully Willa Sibert Cather
The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modelling of human faces.
Light |
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
A man is a great thing upon the earth and through eternity; but every jot of the greatness of man is unfolded out of woman.
Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death; and if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, and ceas’d the moment life appear’d. All goes onward and outward—nothing collapses; and to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
In the very best poetry there is often an under-song of sense which none but the poetic mind… can comprehend.
Earth | Power | Friendship |
Round a turn of the Qin Fortress winds the Wei River, and Yellow Mountain foot-hills enclose the Court of China; past the South Gate willows comes the Car of Many Bells on the upper Palace-Garden Road-a solid length of blossom; a Forbidden City roof holds two phoenixes in cloud; the foliage of spring shelters multitudes from rain; and now, when the heavens are propitious for action, here is our Emperor ready-no wasteful wanderer.
It is not poverty so much as pretense that harasses a ruined man - the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse - the keeping up of a hollow show that must soon come to an end.
Men |
In the bosom of one of those spacious coves which indent the eastern shore of the Hudson, at that broad expansion of the river denominated by the ancient Dutch navigators the Tappan Zee, and where they always prudently shortened sail and implored the protection of St. Nicholas when they crossed, there lies a small market town or rural port, which by some is called Greensburgh, but which is more generally and properly known by the name of Tarry Town.
Alms | Angels | Earth | Giving | God | Good | Man | Right | Following | God |
He would have passed a pleasant life of it, in despite of the Devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was--a woman.
Genius |
As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.