Alone
“We live as we dream — alone.”
~ Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness
Dream
“All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.”
~ Edgar Allen Poe – A Dream Within a Dream
Darkside
“Everybody is like the moon and has a dark side
which he never shows anybody.”
~ Mark Twain – Following the Equator
Duty
“I slept and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke and found that life was Duty.”
~ Ellen Sturgis Hooper
“When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes.”
~ Erasmus
Littlegirl
There Was A Little Girl
There was a little girl, she had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead;
And when she was good, she was very, very good,
And when she was bad, she was horrid.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Listeners
The Listeners
Is anybody there?” said the Traveler,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence chomped the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor.
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the traveler’s head:
And he smote upon the door a second time;
“Is there anybody there?” he said.
But no one descended to the Traveler;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his gray eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveler’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
‘Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:–
“Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,” he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Aye, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
~ Walter De La Mare
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