Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven;
Summer, with flowers that fell;
Remembrance, fallen from heaven,
And madness risen from hell;
Strength without hands to smite;
Love that endures for a breath;
Night, the shadow of light,
And Life, the shadow of death.
----Algernon Charles Swinburne "Atalanta in Calydon" (1865)

For the crown of our life as it closes
Is darkness, the fruit there of dust;
No thorns go as deep as the rose's,
And love is more cruel than lust.
Time turns the old days to derision,
Our loves into corpses or wives;
And marriage and death and division
Make barren our lives.
----Algernon Charles Swinburne "Dolores" (1866)

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
----William Butler Yeats

If I could take your troubles
I would toss them into the sea,
But all these things I'm finding
Are impossible for me.
I cannot build a mountain
Or catch a rainbow fair,
But let me be what I know best,
A friend that is always there.
----Khahlil Gibran "A True Friend

If wild my breast and sore my pride,
I bask in dreams of suicide,
if cool my heart and high my head
I think "How lucky are the dead"
----Dorothy Parker "Mortal Thoughts"

Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul.
Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.
----Ralph Vaull Starr

With all thou art
Feeling, thinking, seeing;
Love me in the
Lightest part,
Love me in full
Being.
----Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Rest not! Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die.
Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time.
----Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
----Lord Byron "She Walks in Beauty"

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
Your are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
----Edgar Allen Poe "A Dream Within A Dream

Two souls with but a single thought,
Two hearts that beat as one.
----Maria Lovell "Ingomar the Barbarian

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.
----Arthur O'Shaughnessy