If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

-Shelley, Ode to the West Wind

Haste

A moment's halt - a momentary taste
Of being from the well amid the waste -
And lo - the phantom caravan has reached
The nothing it set out from - oh, make haste!

-Omar Khayyam/Edward Fitzgerald,
The Rubaiyat

Radiance

The ground we walk on, the plants and creatures,
the clouds above constantly dissolving into new
formations - each gift of nature possessing its own
radiant energy, bound together by cosmic harmony.

-Ruth Bernhard

Dwarfs

Invitation

Chorus

Crown

Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains;
They crowned him long ago
On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds,
With a diadem of snow.

-Lord Byron, Manfred


The clear, sweet singer with the crown of snow
Not whiter than the thoughts that housed below.

-James Russell Lowell,
To George William Curtis

Memory

Long, long be my heart with such memories fill'd!
Like the vase in which roses have once been distill'd:
You may break, you may shatter the vase if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.

-Thomas Moore, Farewell! But Whenever...

Nobility

If there be no nobility of descent,
all the more indispensable is it that
there should be nobility of ascent,
a character in them that bear rule
so fine and high and pure that
as men come within the circle of its
influence they involuntarily pay homage
to that which is the one pre-eminent
distinction, the royalty of virtue.

-Bishop Henry C. Potter,
Address at the Washington Centennial
Service in St. Paul's Chapel