C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917. Dawn
There is no solemnity so deep, to a right-thinking creature, as that of dawn.Ruskin.
1 The morning steals upon the night, Melting the darkness.
Shakespeare.
2 Yon grey lines That fret the clouds are messengers of day.
Shakespeare.
3 The dawn is overcast, the morning lowers, And heavily in clouds brings on the day.
Addison.
4 The quiet night, now dappling, ’gan to wane, Dividing darkness from the dawning main.
Byron.
5 Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops.
Shakespeare.
6 The gray-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night, Checkering the eastern clouds with streaks of light.
Shakespeare.
7 The day begins to break, and night is fled, Whose pitchy mantle over-veil’d the earth.
Shakespeare.
8 Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill.
Shakespeare.
9 The sun had not risen, but the vault of heaven was rich with the winning softness that “brings and shuts the day,” while the whole air was filled with the carols of birds, the hymns of the feathered tribe.James Fenimore Cooper.
10 Look, the gentle day, Before the wheels of Phœbus, round about Dapples the drowsy east with spots of gray.
Shakespeare.
11 The eastern gate, all fiery red, Opening on Neptune, with fair blessed beams, Turns into yellow gold his salt-green streams.
Shakespeare.
12 Faster and more fast, O’er night’s brim, day boils at last; Boils, pure gold, o’er the cloud-cup’s brim.
Robert Browning.
13 See the dapple coursers of the morn Beat up the light with their bright silver hoofs, And chase it through the sky.
Marston.
14 Night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast, And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger; At whose approach, ghosts, wand’ring here and there, Troop home to churchyards.
Shakespeare.
15 ’Tis beautiful, when first the dewy light Breaks on the earth! while yet the scented air Is breathing the cool freshness of the night And the bright clouds a tint of crimson wear.
Elizabeth M. Chandler.
16 At last the golden oriental gate Of greatest heaven ’gan to open fair; And Phœbus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate, Came dancing forth shaking his dewy hair, And hurl’d his glist’ing beams through gloomy air.
Spenser.
17 Color, in the outward world, answers to feeling in man; shape to thought; motion, to will. The dawn of day is the nearest outward likeness of an act of creation; and it is, therefore, also the closest type in nature for that in us which most approaches to creation—the realization of an idea by an act of the will.John Sterling.
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