“To wait so long/And want a man refined and strong/Is not at all uncommon. And yet to wait one hundred years/Without a tear, without a care/Makes for a very rare woman. So here our tale appears to show/How marriage deferred/Brings joy unheard/Nothing lost after a century or so. But others love with more ardor/And wed quickly out of passion/Whatever they do/I won’t deplore/Nor shall I preach a lesson.”

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

“Do not speak glibly of virtue. Nothing shall change-nothing-so long as each individual awaits preferment rather than embodying beneficence in himself; so long as we wait upon the edicts of a government ruled by invested and interested men looking to their private purses; so long as we idle in expectation that all shall be healed, and that we shall somehow be stopped in our career of plunder by an eighteen-hundred-year-old mummy, scarred with the wounds of torture, falling out of the sky or stumbling out of the desert, eyes filled with the tears that we should weep ourselves.”

“By innocence I swear, and by my youth, I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth. And that no woman has, nor never none Shall mistress be of it, save I alone. And so, adieu, good madam; never more Will I my master’s tears to you deplore.”

“A Pause of ThoughtI looked for that which is not, nor can be,And hope deferred made my heart sick in truthBut years must pass before a hope of youthIs resigned utterly.I watched and waited with a steadfast will:And though the object seemed to flee awayThat I so longed for, ever day by dayI watched and waited still.Sometimes I said: This thing shall be no more;My expectation wearies and shall cease;I will resign it now and be at peace:Yet never gave it o'er.Sometimes I said: It is an empty nameI long for; to a name why should I giveThe peace of all the days I have to live?--Yet gave it all the same.Alas, thou foolish one! alike unfitFor healthy joy and salutary pain:Thou knowest the chase useless, and againTurnest to follow it.”

“Nothing is so intolerable to man as being fully at rest, without a passion, without business, without entertainment, without care.”