ivy quotes

The seal is set.Now welcome, thou dread power! Nameless, yet thus omnipotent, which here Walk'st in the shadow of the midnight hour With a deep awe, yet all distinct from fear; Thy haunts are ever where the dead walls rear Their ivy mantles, and the solemn scene Derives from thee a sense so deep and clear That we become a part of what has been, And grow unto the spot, all-seeing but unseen.

-Rochdale
^18  Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 4, stanza138.

   Oh, talk not to me of a name great in story; The days of our youth are the days of our glory; And the myrtle and ivy of sweet two-and-twenty Are worth all your laurels, though ever so plenty.

-Rochdale
  'Stanzas  Written on the Road between Florence and Pisa, November1821'.

As creeping ivy clings to wood or stone, And hides the ruin that it feeds upon, So sophistry, cleaves close to, and protects Sin's rotten trunk, concealing its defects.

-William Cowper
  Poems,'The Progress of Error', l.285^8.

Yet once more,O ye laurels, and once more Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never-sere I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, And with forc'd fingers rude, Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear, Compels me to disturb your season due For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.

-John Milton
  Lycidas, opening lines.

Oh roses for the flush of youth, And laurel for the perfect prime; But pluck an ivy branch for me Grown old before my time.

- Christina Georgina Rossetti
  Goblin Market and Other Poems,'Oh Roses for the Flush of Youth'.

I hate to see prudence clinging to the green suckers of youth; 'tis like ivy round a sapling, and spoils the growth of the tree.

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan
  Sir Oliver Surface.The School for Scandal, act 2, sc.3.