Quotes from Alfred Austin

The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul.

If Nature built by rule and square, Than man what wiser would she be? What wins us is her careless care, And sweet unpunctuality.

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.

Exclusiveness in a garden is a mistake as great as it is in society.

Tears are the summer showers to the soul.

Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.

There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.

Is life worth living? Yes, so long As there is wrong to right, Wail of the weak against the strong, Or tyranny to fight;

Tears are summer showers to the soul.

In vain would science scan and trace Firmly her aspect. All the while, There gleams upon her far-off face A vague unfathomable smile.

In truth, if I were asked to say briefly what Pessimism is, I should say it is disappointed Egotism; and the description will hold good, whether we apply it to an individual, to a community, or to an age.

He is dead already who doth not feel Life is worth living still.

Perhaps a maiden's bashfulness is more A matron's lesson than our lips aver.

Faded smiles oft linger in the face, While grief's first flakes fall silent on the heart!

We are all alike, and we love to keep passion aglow at our feet, Like one that sitteth in shade and complacently smiles at the heat.

So, timely you came, and well you chose, You came when most needed, my winter rose. From the snow I pluck you, and fondly press Your leaves 'twixt the leaves of my leaflessness.

'Tis true among fields and woods I sing, Aloof from cities--that my poor strains Were born, like the simple flowers you bring, In English meadows and English lanes.

Doth Nature draw me, 'tis because, Unto my seeming, there doth lurk A lawlessness about her laws, More mood than purpose in her work.

For there is no gardening without humility, an assiduous willingness to learn, and a cheerful readiness to confess you were mistaken. Nature is continually sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.

A garden that one makes oneself becomes associated with one's personal history and that of one's friends, interwoven with one's tastes, preferences, and character, and constitutes a sort of unwritten, but withal manifest autobiography.

Show me your garden, provided it be your own, and I will tell you what you are like.

The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul.

Poetry is the subject at present of much prose criticism, prose exposition, and prose controversy; but the controversialists are largely the poets themselves, or those who aspire to the title. The subject is treated by them with much earnestness, indeed with some little heat; and it is easy to perceive that the main object of most of the disputants is to establish the superiority of the poet whom the critic himself most admires, and possibly whom he himself most resembles.