Bayard Taylor (January 11, 1825 – December 19, 1878) was an American poet, literary critic, translator, travel author, and diplomat.
The healing of the world is in its nameless saints. Each separate star seems nothing, but a myriad scattered stars break up the night and make it beautiful.
Voluptuous bloom and fragrance rare The summer to its rose may bring; Far sweeter to the wooing air The hidden violet of spring. Still, still that lovely ghost appears, Too fair, too pure, to bid depart; No riper love of later years Can steal its beauty from the heart.
Sometimes an hour of Fate's serenest weather Strikes through our changeful sky its coming beams; Somewhere above us, in elusive ether, Waits the fulfilment of our dearest dreams.
Peace the offspring is of Power.
Love's humility is love's true pride.
The nearest approach I have ever seen to the symmetry of ancient sculpture was among the Arab tribes of Ethiopia. Our Saxon race can supply the athlete, but not the Apollo.
In the glory which overhangs Palestine afar off, we imagine emotions which never come, when we tread the soil and walk over the hallowed sites.
But who will watch my lilies, When their blossoms open white? By day the sun shall be sentry, And the moon and the stars by night!
So far as female beauty is concerned, the Circassian women have no superiors. They have preserved in their mountain home the purity of the Grecian models, and still display the perfect physical loveliness, whose type has descended to us in the Venus de Medici.
When May, with cowslip-braided locks, Walks through the land in green attire. And burns in meadow-grass the phlox His torch of purple fire: And when the punctual May arrives, With cowslip-garland on her brow, We know what once she gave our lives, And cannot give us now!
It is an agreeable and yet a painful sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and manners are different from one's own.
Sweeter than the stolen kiss Are the granted kisses
The stream from Wisdom's well, Which God supplies, is inexhaustible.
The source of each accordant strain Lies deeper than the Poet's brain. First from the people's heart must spring The passions which he learns to sing; They are the wind, the harp is he, To voice their fitful melody,-- The language of their varying fate, Their pride, grief, love, ambition, hate,-- The talisman which holds inwrought The touchstone of the listener's thought; That penetrates each vain disguise, And brings his secret to his eyes.
To learn by observation is traveling, people must also bring knowledge with them.
I know I am--that simplest bliss The millions of my brothers miss. I know the fortune to be born, Even to the meanest wretch they scorn.
As I toiled up the Mount of Olives, in the very footsteps of Christ, panting with the heat and the difficult ascent, I found it utterly impossible to conceive that the Deity, in human form, had walked there before me.
Life lives only in success.
The maxims tell you to aim at perfection, which is well; but it's unattainable, all the same.
The Prophet's words were true; The mouth of Ali is the golden door Of Wisdom. " When his friends to Ali bore These words, he smiled and said: "And should they ask The same until my dying day, the task Were easy; for the stream from Wisdom's well, Which God supplies, is inexhaustible.