Richard Henry Stoddard

There are gains for all our losses,
There are balms for all our pain:
But when youth, the dream, departs,
It takes something from our hearts,
And it never comes again.

Richard Henry Stoddard (July 2, 1825 – May 12, 1903) was a U.S. critic and poet, was born in Hingham, Massachusetts.

• Children are the keys of Paradise … They alone are good and wise, Because their thoughts, their very lives, are prayer.
  • Songs of Summer (1856), p. 113.

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• We have two lives about us,
  Two worlds in which we dwell,
  Within us and without us,
  Alternate Heaven and Hell:—
  Without, the somber Real,
  Within, our hearts of hearts, the beautiful Ideal.
  • The Castle in the Air.

• Silence is the speech of love,
  The music of the spheres above.
  • Speech of Love.

• Pale in her fading bowers the Summer stands,
  Like a new Niobe with claspèd hands,
  Silent above the flowers, her children lost,
  Slain by the arrows of the early Frost.
  • Ode.

• There are gains for all our losses,
  There are balms for all our pain:
  But when youth, the dream, departs,
  It takes something from our hearts,
  And it never comes again.
  • The Flight of Youth.

• Joy may be a miser,
  But Sorrow’s purse is free.
  • Persian Song.

• Not what we would, but what we must
  Makes up the sum of living;
  Heaven is both more and less than just
  In taking and in giving.
  • The Country Life.

• A face at the window,
  A tap on the pane;
  Who is it that wants me
  To-night in the rain?
  • The Messenger at Night.

• It beckons, I follow.
  Good-by to the light,
  I am going, O whither?
  Out into the night.
  • The Messenger at Night.

External links

• Works by Richard Henry Stoddard at Project Gutenberg