Nathaniel Parker Willis
Nathaniel Parker Willis
Nathaniel Parker Willis, also known as N. P. Willis, was an American author, poet and editor who worked with several notable American writers including Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He became the highest-paid magazine writer of his day. For a time, he was the employer of former slave and future writer Harriet Jacobs. His brother was the composer Richard Storrs Willis and his sister Sara wrote under the name Fanny Fern...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth20 January 1806
CountryUnited States of America
Youth is beautiful; its friendship is precious; the intercourse with it is a purifying release from the worn and stained harness of older life.
The soul of man createth its own destiny.
Vulgarity is more obvious in satin than in homespun.
There they stand, the innumerable stars, shining in order like a living hymn, written in light.
The lily and the rose in her fair face striving for precedence.
There is a gentle element, and man may breathe it with a calm, unruffled soul, and drink its living waters, till his heart is pure; and this is human happiness.
Spring is a beautiful piece of work; and not to be in the country to see it done is the not realizing what glorious masters we are, and how cheerfully, minutely, and unflaggingly the fair fingers of the season broider the world for us.
The Spring is here--the delicate footed May, With its slight fingers full of leaves and flowers, And with it comes a thirst to be away. In lovelier scenes to pass these sweeter hours.
Fine taste is an aspect of genius itself, and is the faculty of delicate appreciation, which makes the best effects of art our own.
The value of life deepens incalculably with the privileges of travel.
The dust is old upon my "sandal-shoon," And still I am a pilgrim; I have roved From wild America to Bosphor's waters, And worshipp'd at innumerable shrines Of beauty; and the painter's art, to me, And sculpture, speak as with a living tongue, And of dead kingdoms, I recall the soul, Sitting amid their ruins.
It is godlike to unloose the spirit, and forget yourself in thought.
How beautiful it is for a man to die Upon the walls of Zion! to be called Like a watch-worn and weary sentinel, To put his armour off, and rest in heaven!
There is no divining-rod whose dip shall tell us at twenty what we shall most relish at thirty.