John Greenleaf Whittier Quotes About Past

Quotes about: Past

• What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye? What calls back the past like the rich pumpkin pie?

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Thanksgiving, Food, Eye

  1844 'The Pumpkin,' stanza 3.

• The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the din Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in.

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Past, Echoes, History

  John Greenleaf Whittier (1857*). “Poems of John Greenleaf Whittier”, p.221

• The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past,--flowers, perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of Time.

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Flower, Past, Offering

  John Greenleaf Whittier (1845). “The Stranger in Lowell”, p.145

• With smoking axle hot with speed, with steeds of fire and steam, Wide-waked To-day leaves Yesterday behind him like a dream. Still, from the hurrying train of Life, fly backward far and fast The milestones of the fathers, the landmarks of the past. But human hearts remain unchanged: the sorrow and the sin, The loves and hopes and fears of old, are to our own akin; And if, in tales our fathers told, the songs our mothers sung, Tradition wears a snowy beard, Romance is always young.

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Mother, Dream, Song

  John Greenleaf Whittier (2012). “Narrative and Legendary Poems, Complete Volume I., the Works of Whittier”, p.120, tredition

• Children have neither past nor future - they rejoice in the present.

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Wisdom, Children, Past

• Ah! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West, From North and South, come the pilgrim and guest, When the gray-haired New Englander sees round his board The old broken links of affection restored, When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more, And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before. What moistens the lips and what brightens the eye? What calls back the past, like the rich pumpkin pie?

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Girl, Mother, Eye

  1844 'The Pumpkin,' stanza 3.

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