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So be my passing! My task accomplished and the long day done, My wages taken, and in my heart Some late lark singing, Let me be gathered in the quiet west, The sundown splendid and serene, Death.

William Ernest Henley

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William Ernest Henley
Age: 53 †
Born: 1849
Born: August 23
Died: 1903
Died: July 11
Editor
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
W. E. Henley
Quiet
Wages
Late
Passings
Taken
Accomplished
Sundown
Death
Task
Lark
Done
Passing
Larks
Heart
Tasks
Gathered
Long
West
Serene
Singing
Splendid

More quotes by William Ernest Henley

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Into the winter's gray delight, Into the summer's golden dream, Holy and high and impartial, Death, the mother of Life, Mingles all men for ever.
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Life - life - life! 'Tis the sole great thing This side of death, Heart on heart in the wonder of Spring!
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Life - life - let there be life!
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A late lark twitters from the quiet skies.
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I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
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Night with her train of stars And her great gift of sleep.
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Life is a smoke that curls- Curls in a flickering skein, That winds and whisks and whirls, A figment thin and vain, Into the vast inane. One end for hut and hall.
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For it's home, dearie, home--it's home I want to be. Our topsails are hoisted, and we'll away to sea. O, the oak and the ash and the bonnie birken tree They're all growing green in the old countrie.
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It is the artist's function not to copy but to synthesise: to eliminate from that gross confusion of actuality which is his raw material whatever is accidental, idle, irrelevant, and select for perpetuation that only which is appropriate and immortal.
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Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
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Life is worth Living Through every grain of it, From the foundations To the last edge Of the cornerstone, death.
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Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable.
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Behold me waiting—waiting for the knife.... The thick, sweet mystery of chloroform, The drunken dark, the little death-in-life.... [F]ace to face with chance, I shrink a little: My hopes are strong, my will is something weak. ...I am ready But, gentlemen my porters, life is brittle: You carry Cæsar and his fortunes—steady!
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Shakespeare and Rembrandt have in common the faculty of quickening speculation and compelling the minds of men to combat and discussion.
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This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.
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It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
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Men may scoff, and men may pray, But they pay Every pleasure with a pain.
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Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well or, if this way of putting it seem indecorous and abominable, he very often writes so well that you are loth to believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill.
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Madam Life's a piece in bloom Death goes dogging everywhere: she's the tenant of the room, he's the ruffian on the stair.
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Life is, I think, a blunder and a shame.
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