Sidney Lanier
Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation.Collection: Poetry
Music is love in search of a word.Collection: Love
If you want to be found stand where the seeker seeks.Collection: Wisdom
I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk.Collection: Poetry
Virtues are acquired through endeavor, which rests wholly upon yourself.Collection: Wisdom
If a man made himself an expert in any particular branch of human activity, there would result the strong tendency that a peculiar aptitude towards the same branch would be found among some of his descendants.
But I cannot bring myself to believe that I was intended for a musician, because it seems so small a business in comparison with other things which, it seems to me, I might do. Question here: 'What is the province of music in the economy of the world?'
And yet shall Love himself be heard,Though long deferred, though long deferred:O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred:Music is Love in search of a word.Collection: Long
When I hear music, it seems to me that all the sins of my life pass slowly by me with veiled faces, lay their hands on my head, and say softly, "My child."Collection: Music
My priciple is, the artist shall put forth, humbly & lovingly, without bitterness, the very best & highest that is within him,utterly regardless of contemporary criticism.Collection: Artist
Music is love searching for a word.Collection: Searching For Love
Sweet Sometime, fly fast for me.Collection: Sweet
Look out, Death: I am coming.-Art thou not glad? what talks we'll have.-What memories of old battles.-Come, bring the bowl, Death; I am thirsty.Collection: Art
Music means harmony, harmony means love. Love means God.Collection: Mean
Death lieth still in the way of life, Like as a stone in the way of a brook; I will sing against thee, Death, as the brook does, I will make thee into music which does not die.Collection: Death
Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free, Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea.Collection: Simple
Verse is a set of specially related sounds, repeated aloud.Collection: Sound
Out of the hills of Habersham, Down the valleys of Hall, I hurry amain to reach the plain; Run the rapid and leap the fall, Split at the rock, and together again Accept my bed, or narrow or wide, And flee from folly on every side With a lover's pain to attain the plain, Far from the hills of Habersham, Far from the valleys of Hall.Collection: Running
Into the woods, my Master went, Clean forspent, forspent, Into the woods my Master came, Forspent with love and shame. But the olives they were not blind to Him, The little gray leaves were kind to Him: The thorn-tree had a mind to Him, When into the woods He came.Collection: Tree
The sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West.Collection: Waiting
But I cannot bring myself to believe that I was intended for a musician, because it seems so small a business in comparison with other things which, it seems to me, I might do. Question here: 'What is the province of music in the economy of the world?Collection: Believe
O Trade, O Trade! Would thou wert dead!The time needs heart - 'tis tired of head.Collection: Tired
Leap through the Mystery of death as the circus-rider leaps through the papered hoop ... find Life ambling along beneath us on the Other Side.Collection: Mystery Of Death