Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Thomas Bailey Aldrichwas an American writer, poet, critic, and editor. He is notable for his long editorship of The Atlantic Monthly, during which he published works by Charles Chesnutt and others. He was also known for his semi-autobiographical book The Story of a Bad Boy, and for his poetry, which included "The Unguarded Gates"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth11 November 1836
CountryUnited States of America
men mind company
A man is known by the company his mind keeps.
birthday hope heart
To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent that is to triumph over old age.
wings imagination mind
I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.
teaching fate doe
The fate of the worm refutes the pretended ethical teaching of the proverb, which assumes to illustrate the advantage of early rising and does so by showing how extremely dangerous it is.
women eyebrows way
The ability to have our own way, and at the same time convince others they are having their own way, is a rare thing among men. Among women it is as common as eyebrows.
ocean men bones
The ocean moans over dead men's bones.
summer spring fall
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.
suicide thinking blue
So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane.
passion men air
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates And through them presses a wild motley throng Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav Flying the Old World's poverty and scorn These bringing with them unknown gods and rites Those, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws In street and alley what strange tongues are loud Accents of menace alien to our air Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew! O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well To leave the gates unguarded?
rain wind rivers
We knew it would rain, for the poplars showed The white of their leaves, the amber grain Shrunk in the wind,-and the lightning now Is tangled in tremulous skeins of rain.
memorial-day land tears
With the tears a Land hath shed. Their graves should ever be green.
vocabulary age next
What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.
laughing optimism joy
This one sits shivering in Fortune's smile, taking his joy with bated, doubtful breath. This other, gnawed by hunger, all the while laughs in the teeth of Death.
letting-go kings war
My mind lets go a thousand things, Like dates of wars and deaths of kings