William Cullen Bryant
12 quotes
Biography
William Cullen Bryant was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New-York Evening Post. Born in Massachusetts, he started his career as a lawyer but showed an interest in poetry early in his life.
"And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief;"
"The groves were God's first temples."
"The right to discuss freely and openly, by speech, by the pen, by the press, all political questions, and to examine and animadvert upon all political institutions, is a right so clear and certain, so interwoven with our other liberties, so necessary, in fact to their existence, that without it we must fall at once into depression or anarchy. To say that he who holds unpopular opinions must hold them at the peril of his life, and that, if he expresses them in public, he has only himself to blame if they who disagree with him should rise and put him to death, is to strike at all rights, all liberties, all protection of the laws, and to justify and extenuate all crimes."
"Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste."
"There is something in this universe which justifies William Cullen Bryant in saying Truth crushed to earth will rise again."
"[Thanatopsis] was written in 1817, when Bryant was 23. Had he died then, the world would have thought it had lost a great poet. But he lived on."
"All that tread,The globe are but a handful to the tribes,That slumber in its bosom."
"Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the soil."
"The melancholy days have come the saddest of the year Of wailing winds and naked woods and meadows brown and sear."
"Weep not that the world changes- did it keep a stable changeless state it were a cause indeed to weep."
"To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms she speaks A various language."
"Truth crushed to earth shall rise again."