C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Violets

The violet is a nun.

Hood.

Violets spring in the soft May shower.

Bryant.

Banks that slope to the southern sky
Where languid violets love to lie.

Sarah Helen Whitman.

And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.

Tennyson.

The violet thinks, with her timid blue eye,
To pass for a blossom enchantingly shy.

Francis S. Osgood.

Surely as cometh the Winter, I know
There are Spring violets under the snow.

R. H. Newell.

Here oft we sought the violet, as it lay
Buried in beds of moss and lichens gray.

Sarah Helen Whitman.

Steals timidly away,
Shrinking as violets do in summer’s ray.

Moore.

And shade the violets,
That they may bind the moss in leafy nets.

Keats.

The country ever has a lagging Spring,
Waiting for May to call its violets forth.

Bryant.

Early violets blue and white
Dying for their love of light.

Edwin Arnold.

Yet there upon that upland height
The darlings of the early spring
Blue violets—were blossoming.

Julia C. R. Dorr.

Again the violet of our early days
Drinks beauteous azure from the golden sun,
And kindles into fragrance at his blaze.

Ebenezer Elliott.

The sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor!

Shakespeare.

Violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,
Or Cytherea’s breath.

Shakespeare.

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky.

Wordsworth.

In kindly showers and sunshine bud
The branches of the dull gray wood;
Out from its sunned and sheltered nooks
The blue eye of the violet looks.

Whittier.

The smell of violets, hidden in the green,
Pour’d back into my empty soul and frame
The times when I remembered to have been
Joyful and free from blame.

Tennyson.

The tender violet bent in smiles
To elves that sported nigh,
Tossing the drops of fragrant dew
To scent the evening sky.

Elizabeth Oakes Smith.

And the violet lay dead while the odor flew
On the wings or the wind o’er the waters blue.

Shelley.

Hath the pearl less whiteness
Because of its birth?
Hath the violet less brightness
For growing near earth?

Moore.

And in my breast
Spring wakens too; and my regret
Becomes an April violet,
And buds and blossoms like the rest.

Tennyson.

The modest, lowly violet
In leaves of tender green is set;
So rich she cannot hide from view,
But covers all the bank with blue.

Dora Read Goodale.

We are violets blue,
For our sweetness found
Careless in the mossy shades,
Looking on the ground.
Love’s dropp’d eyelids and a kiss,—
Such our breath and blueness is.

Leigh Hunt.

A blossom of returning light,
An April flower of sun and dew;
The earth and sky, the day and night
Are melted in her depth of blue!

Dora Read Goodale.

Cold blows the wind against the hill,
And cold upon the plain;
I sit me by the bank, until
The violets come again.

Richard Garnett.

When beechen buds begin to swell,
And woods the blue-bird’s warble know,
The yellow violet’s modest bell
Peeps from the last year’s leaves below.

Bryant.

The violets were past their prime,
Yet their departing breath
Was sweeter, in the blast of death,
Than all the lavish fragrance of the time.

Montgomery.

What thought is folded in thy leaves!
What tender thought, what speechless pain!
I hold thy faded lips to mine,
Thou darling of the April rain.

T. B. Aldrich.

Violets!—deep-blue violets!
April’s loveliest coronets!
There are no flowers grow in the vale,
Kiss’d by the dew, woo’d by the gale,—
None by the dew of the twilight wet,
So sweet as the deep-blue violet.

L. E. Landon.

Violet! sweet violet!
Thine eyes are full of tears;
Are they wet
Even yet
With the thought of other years?

Lowell.

A humble flower long time I pined
Upon the solitary plain,
And trembled at the angry wind,
And shrunk before the bitter rain.
And oh! ’twas in a blessed hour
A passing wanderer chanced to see,
And, pitying the lonely flower,
To stoop and gather me.

Thackeray.

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