Alfred Austin Quotations

Tears are the summer showers to the soul.

The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul.

Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.

Exclusiveness in a garden is a mistake as great as it is in society.

There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.

Public opinion is no more than this: what people think that other people think.

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

From sunny woof and cloudy weft Fell rain in sheets; so, to myself I hummed these hazard rhymes, and left The learned volume on the shelf.

So, timely you came, and well you chose, You came when most needed, my winter rose. From the snow I pluck you, and fondly press Your leaves 'twixt the leaves of my leaflessness.

Thought, stumbling, plods Past fallen temples, vanished gods, Altars unincensed, fanes undecked, Eternal systems flown or wrecked; Through trackless centuries that grant To the poor trudge refreshment scant, Age after age, pants on to find A melting mirage of the mind.

Where has thou been all the dumb winter days When neither sunlight was nor smile of flowers, Neither life, nor love, nor frolic, Only expanse melancholic, With never a note of thy exhilarating lays?

In vain would science scan and trace Firmly her aspect. All the while, There gleams upon her far-off face A vague unfathomable smile.

No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.

Falling stars are high examples sent To warn, not lure. Gross fancy says they are Substantial meteors; but that is not so. They are the merest phantasies of Night, When she's asleep, and, dimly visited By past effects, she dreams of Lucifer Hurled out of Heaven.

Perhaps a maiden's bashfulness is more A matron's lesson than our lips aver.

In my song you catch at times Note sweeter far than mine, And in the tangle of my rhymes Can scent the eglantine.

Never did form more fairy thread the dance Than she who scours the hills to find it flowers; Never did sweeter lips chained ears entrance Than hers that move, true to its striking hours; No hands so white e'er decked the warrior's lance, As those which tend its lamp as darkness lours; And never since dear Christ expired for man, Had holy shrine so fair a sacristan.

Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.

When held up to the window pane, What fixed my baby stare? The glory of the glittering rain, And newness everywhere.

Through the dripping weeks that follow One another slow, and soak Summer's extinguished fire and autumn's drifting smoke.

Tis true among fields and woods I sing, Aloof from cities--that my poor strains Were born, like the simple flowers you bring, In English meadows and English lanes.

Faded smiles oft linger in the face, While grief's first flakes fall silent on the heart!

Is life worth living? Yes, so long As Spring revives the year, And hails us with the cuckoo's song, To show that she is here;

There is no gardening without humility

Pale January lay In its cradle day by day Dead or living, hard to say.

Life seems like a haunted wood, where we tremble and crouch and cry.

The bright incarnate spirit of the Morn.

Doth Nature draw me, 'tis because, Unto my seeming, there doth lurk A lawlessness about her laws, More mood than purpose in her work.

If Nature built by rule and square, Than man what wiser would she be? What wins us is her careless care, And sweet unpunctuality.

We are all alike, and we love to keep passion aglow at our feet, Like one that sitteth in shade and complacently smiles at the heat.

Though my verse but roam the air And murmur in the trees, You may discern a purpose there, As in music of the bees.

He is dead already who doth not feel Life is worth living still.

My virgin sense of sound was steeped In the music of young streams; And roses through the casement peeped, And scented all my dreams.

A garden that one makes oneself becomes associated with one’s personal history and that of one’s friends, interwoven with one’s tastes, preferences and character and constitutes a sort of unwritten autobiography.

Have you never, when waves were breaking, watched children at sport on the beach, With their little feet tempting the foam-fringe, till with stronger and further reach Than they dreamed of, a billow comes bursting, how they turn and scamper and screech!

We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden.

Is life worth living? Yes, so long as there is wrong to right. So long as faith with freedom reigns and loyal hope survives, And gracious charity remains to leaven lowly lives; While there is only one untrodden tract for intellect or will, And men are free to think and act, Life is worth living still.