wildness quotes

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins
  'Inversnaid'.

Wildness and silence disappeared fromthe countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fall but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced.

- Archibald MacLeish
  'The Great  American Frustration', in the Saturday Review, 9  Jul.

The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains isgoing home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.

-John Muir
Our National Parks, ch.1,'The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West'.

No pleasing Intricacies intervene, No artful wildness to perplex the scene; Grove nods at grove, each a mirror of the other. The suff'ring eye inverted Nature sees, Trees cut to Statues, Statues thick as trees, With here a Fountain, never to be play'd, And there a Summer-house, that knows no shade; Here Amphitrite sails thro'myrtle bow'rs There Gladiators fight, or die, in flow'rs Un-water'd see the drooping sea-horse mourn, And swallows roost in Nilus'dusty Urn.

- Alexander Pope
Epistles to Several Persons,'To Lord Burlington', l.115^25.