Washington Irving
It was, as I have said, a fine autumnal day; the sky was clear and serene, and nature wore that rich and golden livery which we always associate with the idea of abundance. The forests had put on their sober brown and yellow, while some trees of the tendered kind had been nipped by the frosts into brilliant dyes of orange, purple, and scarlet.Collection: Autumn
Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.Collection: Loneliness
The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated.Collection: Family
The Indians with surprise found the mouldering trees of their forests suddenly teeming with ambrosial sweet; and nothing, I am told, can exceed the greedy relish with which they banquet for the first time upon this unbought luxury of the wilderness.Collection: Sweet
History is but a kind of Newgate calendar, a register of the crimes and miseries that man has inflicted on his fellow-man.Collection: Men
A woman is more considerate in affairs of love than a man; because love is more the study and business of her life.Collection: Love
The tie which links mother and child is of such pure and immaculate strength as to be never violated, except by those whose feelings are withered by vitiated society. Holy, simple, and beautiful in its construction, it is the emblem of all we can imagine of fidelity and truth.Collection: Beautiful
I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration.Collection: Heart
Redundancy of language is never found with deep reflection. Verbiage may indicate observation, but not thinking. He who thinks much says but little in proportion to his thoughts.Collection: Reflection
Every antique farm-house and moss-grown cottage is a picture.Collection: House
Critics are a kind of freebooters in the republic of letters--who, like deer, goats and divers other graminivorous animals, gain subsistence by gorging upon buds and leaves of the young shrubs of the forest, thereby robbing them of their verdure, and retarding their progress to maturity.Collection: Maturity
Nature seems to delight in disappointing the assiduities of art, with which it would rear legitimate dulness to maturity; and to glory in the vigour and luxuriance of her chance productions.Collection: Art
From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections.Collection: Regret
There is something nobly simple and pure in a taste for the cultivation of forest trees. It argues, I think, a sweet and generous nature to have his strong relish for the beauties of vegetation, and this friendship for the hardy and glorious sons of the forest. He who plants a tree looks forward to future ages, and plants for posterity. Nothing could be less selfish than this.Collection: Sweet
By a kind of fashionable discipline, the eye is taught to brighten, the lip to smile, and the whole countenance to emanate with the semblance of friendly welcome, while the bosom is unwarmed by a single spark of genuine kindness and good-will.Collection: Kindness
The Englishman is too apt to neglect the present good in preparing against the possible evil.Collection: Evil
The moan of the whip-poor-will from the hillside; the boding cry of the tree-toad, that harbinger of storm; the dreary hooting of the screechowl.Collection: Tree
My father died and left me his blessing and his business. His blessing brought no money into my pocket, and as to his business, it soon deserted me, for I was busy writing poetry, and could not attend to law, and my clients, though they had great respect for my talents, had no faith in a poetical attorney.Collection: Father
A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands. But a mother's love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world's condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still she remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy.Collection: Mother
It's a fair wind that blew men to ale.Collection: Beer
Christmas is here, Merry old Christmas, Gift-bearing Christmas, Day of grand memories, King of the year!Collection: Christmas
History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?Collection: Fall
The literary world is made up of little confederacies, each looking upon its own members as the lights of the universe; and considering all others as mere transient meteors, doomed to soon fall and be forgotten, while its own luminaries are to shine steadily into immortality.Collection: Fall
True love will not brook reserve; it feels undervalued and outraged, when even the sorrows of those it loves are concealed from it.Collection: Love
Her mighty lakes, like oceans of liquid silver; her mountains with their right aerial tints; her valleys, teeming with wild fertility; her tremendous cataracts, thundering in their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure; her brought deep rivers, rolling in solemn silence to the ocean; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts forth all its magnificence; her skies, kindling waves in the magic of the summer clouds and glorious sunshine;-no, never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery.Collection: Beautiful
Oh the grave!--the grave!--It buries every error--covers every defect--extinguishes every resentment! From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections. Who can look down upon the grave even of an enemy, and not feel a compunctious throb, that he should ever have warred with the poor handful of earth that lies mouldering before him!Collection: Death
Poetry had breathed over and sanctified the land.Collection: Land
The almighty dollar, that great object of universal devotion.Collection: Money
It is worthy to note, that the early popularity of Washington was not the result of brilliant achievement nor signal success; on the contrary, it rose among trials and reverses, and may almost be said to have been the fruit of defeat.Collection: Rose
A mother is the truest friend we have when trials, heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity.Collection: Mothers Day
There is a majestic grandeur in tranquillity.Collection: Majestic
I could not but smile to think in what out-of-the-way corners genius produces her bantlings! And the Muses, those capricious dames, who, forsooth, so often refuse to visit palaces, and deny a single smile to votaries in splendid studies, and gilded drawing-rooms--what holes and burrows will they frequent to lavish their favors on some ragged disciple!Collection: Thinking
There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse.Collection: Change
There is an emanation from the heart in genuine hospitality which cannot be described, but is immediately felt and puts the stranger at once at his ease.Collection: Thank You
I have often had occasion to remark the fortitude with which women sustain the most overwhelming reverses of fortunes.Collection: Endurance