Music, where soft voices die.
Vibrates in the memory. [ Shelley ]

O there are Voices of the Past,
Links of a broken chain.
Wings that can bear me back to times
Which cannot come again;
Yet God forbid that I should lose
The echoes that remain! [ Adelaide A. Procter ]

He never is crowned
With immortality, who fears to follow
Where airy voices lead. [ Keats ]

I know there are voices I do not hear,
And colors I do not see;
I know that the world has numberless doors
Of which I have not the key. [ Minot J. Savage ]

Earth with her thousand voices praises God. [ Coleridge ]

But shapes that come not at an earthly call,
Will not depart when mortal voices bid. [ Wordsworth ]

Ye have a world of light,
When love in the loved rejoices;
But the blind man's home is the house of night.
And its beings are empty voices. [ Bulwer ]

Over the river they beckon to me,
Loved ones who've crossed to the farther side;
The gleam of their snowy robes I see.
But their voices are drowned in the dashing tide. [ Nancy A. W. Priest ]

Duty speaks with the lawful authority of many voices; pleasure has no strength except in the longing desire of the hungry unit. [ Edith Simcox ]

God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. [ Channing ]

Do we not hear voices, gentle and great, and some of them like the voices of departed friends - do we not hear them saying to us, Come up hither? [ Wm. Mountford ]

Young voices around the domestic altar, breathing sacred music at the hour of morning and evening devotion, are a sweet and touching accompaniment. [ K. Arvine ]

O youth! ephemeral song, eternal canticle! The world may end, the heavens fall, yet loving voices would still find an echo in the ruins of the universe! [ Jules Janin ]

What delight will it afford to renew the sweet counsel we have taken together, to recount the toils, the combats, and the labor of the way, and to approach, not the house, but the throne of God, in company, in order to join in the symphonies of heavenly voices, and lose ourselves amidst the splendor and fruitions of the beatific vision. [ Robert Hall ]

Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us. [ Lowell ]

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their soul into ours. God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers; they give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live. [ W. E. Channing ]

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 ]