isle quotes
Fairest Isle, all isles excelling, Seat of pleasures, and of loves; Venus here will choose her dwelling, And forsake her Cyprian groves. 291
A ship, an isle, a sickle moon With few but with how splendid stars The mirrors of the sea are strewn Between their silver bars!
Among the smaller islands there is one of fair size that is now called the Isle of Man There was a great controversy in antiquity concerning the question: to which of the two countries should the island properly belong? Eventually, however, the matter was settled. All agreed that since it allowed poisonous reptiles to live in it, it should belong to Britain.
England's foreign policy should always be inspired by the love of freedom. There should be a sympathy with freedom, a desire to give it scope, founded not upon visionary ideas but upon the long experience of many generations within the shores of this happy isle, that in freedom one lays the firmest foundations both of loyalty and order.
Oh thou, that dear and happy isle The garden of the world ere while, Thou paradise of four seas, Which heaven planted us to please, But, to exclude the world, did guard With watery if not flaming sword; What luckless apple did we taste, To make us mortal, and thee waste?
What should we do but sing the praise That led us through the watery maze, Unto an isle so long unknown, And yet far kinder than our own?
Of dire chimeras and enchanted isle And rifted rocks whose entrance leads to Hell,^ For such there be, but unbelief is blind.
Who shall tempt with wand'ring feet The dark unbottomed infinite abyss And through the palpable obscure find out His uncouth way, or spread his aery flight Upborne with indefatigable wings Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive The happy isle.
England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much- quoted passage, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons.
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave's intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.
An isle under Ionian skies Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise.
Four grey walls, and four grey towers, Overlook a space of flowers, And the silent isle imbowers The Lady of Shalott.
Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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