The eternal landscape of the past. [ Tennyson ]
The rising moon has hid the stars;
Her level rays, like golden bars,
Lie on the landscape green,
With shadows brown between. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Endymion ]
Ever charming, ever new,
When will the landscape tire the view? [ John Dyer ]
O friend! O best of friends! Thy absence more
Than the impending night darkens the landscape over. [ Longfellow ]
Every soul has a landscape that changes with the wind that sweeps the sky, with the clouds that return after its rain. [ George MacDonald ]
Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights. [ Ruskin ]
A beautiful smile is to the female countenance what the sunbeam is to the landscape; it embellishes an inferior face and redeems an ugly one. [ Lavater ]
Whatever is pure is also simple. It does not keep the eye on itself. The observer forgets the window in the landscape it displays. A fine style gives the view of fancy - its figures, its trees, or its palaces, - without a spot. [ Willmott ]
Why has the beneficent Creator scattered over the face of the earth such a profusion of beautiful flowers? Why is it that every landscape has its appropriate flowers, every nation its national flowers, every rural home its home flowers? Why do flowers enter and shed their perfume over every scene of life, from the cradle to the grave? Why are flowers made to utter all voices of joy and sorrow in all varying scenes? It is that flowers have in themselves a real and natural significance; they have a positive relation to man; they correspond to actual emotions; they have their mission - a mission of love and mercy; they have their language, and from the remotest ages this language has found its interpreters. [ Henrietta Dumont ]
Morals are an acquirement - like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis - no man is born with them. I wasn't myself, I started poor. I hadn't a single moral. There is hardly a man in this house that is poorer than I was then. Yes, I started like that - the world before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral. I can remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape, the weather, the - I can remember how everything looked. It was an old moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn't fit, anyway. But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World's Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive. When I got that mouldy old moral, she had stopped growing, because she hadn't any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all. Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for business. She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her - ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was - I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad to get her, for without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet high, and they think she's a brontosaur. Well, she looks it. They believe it will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]