Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Butterfly
I’d be a butterfly, born in a bower,
Where roses and lilies and violets meet.
Thomas Haynes Bayly—I’d be a Butterfly.
Gray sail against the sky,
Gray butterfly!
Have you a dream for going
Or are you only the blind wind’s blowing?
Dana Burnet—A Sail at Twilight.
With the rose the butterfly’s deep in love,
A thousand times hovering round;
But round himself, all tender like gold,
The sun’s sweet ray is hovering found.
Heine—Book of Songs. New Spring. No. 7.
Far out at sea,—the sun was high,
While veer’d the wind and flapped the sail,
We saw a snow-white butterfly
Dancing before the fitful gale,
Far out at sea.
Richard Hengist Horne—Genius.
The gold-barr’d butterflies to and fro
And over the waterside wander’d and wove
As heedless and idle as clouds that rove
And drift by the peaks of perpetual snow.
Joaquin Miller—Songs of the Sun-Lands. Isles of the Amazons. Pt. III. St. 41.
And many an ante-natal tomb
Where butterflies dream of the life to come.
Shelley—Sensitive Plant.
Much converse do I find in thee,
Historian of my infancy!
Float near me; do not yet depart!
Dead times revive in thee:
Thou bring’st, gay creature as thou art!
A solemn image to my heart.
Wordsworth—To a Butterfly.