“Who's this—alone with stone and sky?It's only my old dog and I—It's only him; it's only me;Alone with stone and grass and tree. What share we most—we two together?Smells, and awareness of the weather.What is it makes us more than dust?My trust in him; in me his trust.”
“For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what we have read. To open almost any book a second time is to be reminded that we had forgotten well-nigh everything that the writer told us. Parting from the narrator and his narrative, we retain only a fading impression; and he, as it were, takes the book away from us and tucks it under his arm.”
“Oh yes, I know the way to heaven was easy. We found the little kingdom of our passion that all can share who walk the road of lovers. In wild and secret happiness we stumbled; and gods and demons clamoured in our senses.”
“His wet white face and miserable eyesBrought nurses to him more than groans and sighs:But hoarse and low and rapid rose and fellHis troubled voice: he did the business well.(First verse of Died of Wounds)”
“They march from safety, and the bird-sung joyOf grass-green thickets, to the land where allIs ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky”
“December stillness, teach me through your treesThat loom along the west, one with the land,The veiled evangel of your mysteries.While nightfall, sad and spacious, on the downDeepens, and dusk embues me where I stand,With grave diminishings of green and brown,Speak, roofless Nature, your instinctive words;And let me learn your secret from the sky,Following a flock of steadfast-journeying birdsIn lone remote migration beating by.December stillness, crossed by twilight roads,Teach me to travel far and bear my loads.”
“I am banished from the patient men who fight.They smote my heart to pity, built my pride.Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side,They trudged away from life's broad wealds of light.Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my sightThey went arrayed in honour. But they died,--Not one by one: and mutinous I criedTo those who sent them out into the night.The darkness tells how vainly I have strivenTo free them from the pit where they must dwellIn outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and rivenBy grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel.Love drives me back to grope with them through hell;And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.”