Alfred Austin Quotes

The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul.

We come from the earth, we return to the earth, and in between we garden.

Public opinion is no more than this: what people think that other people think.

The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul. Share the botanical bliss of gardeners through the ages, who have cultivated philosophies to apply to their own - and our own - lives: Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.

Tears are summer showers to the soul.

There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.

Is life worth living? Yes, so long as there is wrong to right. So long as faith with freedom reigns and loyal hope survives, And gracious charity remains to leaven lowly lives; While there is only one untrodden tract for intellect or will, And men are free to think and act, Life is worth living still.

A garden that one makes oneself becomes associated with one’s personal history and that of one’s friends, interwoven with one’s tastes, preferences and character and constitutes a sort of unwritten autobiography.

Exclusiveness in a garden is a mistake as great as it is in society.

Alfred Austin said, "Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are."

There is no gardening without humility

No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.

Life seems like a haunted wood, where we tremble and crouch and cry.

He is dead already who doth not feel Life is worth living still.

Though my verse but roam the air And murmur in the trees, You may discern a purpose there, As in music of the bees.

My virgin sense of sound was steeped In the music of young streams; And roses through the casement peeped, And scented all my dreams.

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.

Thought, stumbling, plods Past fallen temples, vanished gods, Altars unincensed, fanes undecked, Eternal systems flown or wrecked; Through trackless centuries that grant To the poor trudge refreshment scant, Age after age, pants on to find A melting mirage of the mind.

Is life worth living? Yes, so long As Spring revives the year, And hails us with the cuckoo's song, To show that she is here.

Where has thou been all the dumb winter days When neither sunlight was nor smile of flowers, Neither life, nor love, nor frolic, Only expanse melancholic, With never a note of thy exhilarating lays?

Have you never, when waves were breaking, watched children at sport on the beach, With their little feet tempting the foam-fringe, till with stronger and further reach Than they dreamed of, a billow comes bursting, how they turn and scamper and screech!

Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.

So, timely you came, and well you chose, You came when most needed, my winter rose. From the snow I pluck you, and fondly press Your leaves 'twixt the leaves of my leaflessness.

In my song you catch at times Note sweeter far than mine, And in the tangle of my rhymes Can scent the eglantine.

Pale January lay In its cradle day by day Dead or living, hard to say.