Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all

The dreary intercourse of daily life.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey.

The sun to me is dark

And silent as the moon,

When she deserts the night

Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.

John Milton (1608-1674): Samson Agonistes. Line 86.

Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834): Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni.

Fall on me like a silent dew,

Or like those maiden showers

Which, by the peep of day, do strew

A baptism o'er the flowers.

Robert Herrick (1591-1674): To Music, to becalm his Fever.

Spires whose "silent finger points to heaven."

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): The Excursion. Book vi.

Even such is time, that takes in trust

Our youth, our joys, our all we have,

And pays us but with age and dust;

Who in the dark and silent grave,

When we have wandered all our ways,

Shuts up the story of our days.

But from this earth, this grave, this dust,

My God shall raise me up, I trust!

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618): Written the night before his death.—Found in his Bible in the Gate-house at Westminster.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan which moves

To that mysterious realm where each shall take

His chamber in the silent halls of death,

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed

By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave

Like one that wraps the drapery of his couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878): Thanatopsis.

Into the silent land!

Ah, who shall lead us thither?

J G Von Salis (1762-1834): The Silent Land.

In all the silent manliness of grief.

Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774): The Deserted Village. Line 384.

The silent organ loudest chants

The master's requiem.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882): Dirge.

Her eyes are homes of silent prayer.

Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892): In Memoriam. xxxii. Stanza 1.

We were the first that ever burst

Into that silent sea.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834): The Ancient Mariner. Part ii.

Risest from forth thy silent sea of pines.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834): Hymn in the Vale of Chamouni.

To die is landing on some silent shore

Where billows never break, nor tempests roar;

Ere well we feel the friendly stroke, 't is o'er.

Samuel Garth (1670-1719): The Dispensary. Canto iii. Line 225.

And when the stream

Which overflowed the soul was passed away,

A consciousness remained that it had left

Deposited upon the silent shore

Of memory images and precious thoughts

That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): The Excursion. Book vii.

Gone before

To that unknown and silent shore.

Charles Lamb (1775-1834): Hester. Stanza 7.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): Sonnet xxx.

O Reader! Had you in your mind

Such stores as silent thought can bring,

O gentle Reader! you would find

A tale in everything.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): Simon Lee.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne,

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific, and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise,

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

John Keats (1795-1821): On first looking into Chapman's Homer.