Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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• It was pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don't think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and the signature (which I guessed at).
  
  There's a singular and a perpetual charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, it never loses its novelty...Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever - unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.
  • letter to Professor E.S. Morsehttp://books.google.com/books?id=fYQCAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA41&lpg=PA41&dq=There's+a+singular+and+a+perpetual+charm+in+a+letter+of+yours&source=bl&ots=DDWCA6FHyJ&sig=MyOOelB_Q2Fmd4jNObeyuptofsc&hl=en&ei=CYKiSvfaNof8MbOq3N0P&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=%22There's%20a%20singular%20and%20a%20perpetual%20charm%20in%20a%20letter%20of%20yours%22&f=false, circa 1889

• All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do so, would I?
  • Leaves From a Notebook, Ponkapog Papers (1903)

• Somewhere—in desolate wind-swept space—
  In Twilight-land—in No-man’s land—
  Two hurrying Shapes met face to face,
  And bade each other stand.
  
  “And who are you?” cried one, agape,
  Shuddering in the gloaming light.
  “I know not,” said the second Shape,
  “I only died last night.”
  • Identity.

• So precious life is! Even to the old
  The hours are as a miser’s coins!
  • Broken Music.

• Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
  Named of the four winds, North, South, East and West;
  Portals that lead to an enchanted land…
  Here, it is written, Toil shall have its wage
  And Honor honor, and the humblest man
  Stand level with the highest in the law.
  Of such a land have men in dungeons dreamed
  And with the vision brightening in their eyes
  Gone smiling to the fagot and the sword.
  
  O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well
  To leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast
  Fold Sorrow’s children, soothe the hurts of Fate,
  Lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel
  Stay those who to thy sacred portals come
  To waste the gifts of Freedom.
  • Unguarded Gates.

• Here is woe, a self and not the mask of woe.
  • Andromeda.

• That was indeed to live—
  At one bold swoop to wrest
  From darkling death the best
  That Death to Life can give!
  • Shaw. Memorial Ode.

• What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round.
  • Miss Mehitabel’s Son.