“Ah! love and song are but a dream, / A flower's faint shade on life's dark stream.”

— Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Vow of the Peacock, 1835, title poem introduction

About Letitia Elizabeth Landon

1802 – 1838

English poet and novelist, who wrote as "L.E.L."

“No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable.”

“Methinks adieu / Is cold, when uttered with aught else but tears.”

“Yes ; look thro' the world, and this truth you will find / That, once out of sight, you are soon out of mind.”

“Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love — and to put its trust in life!”

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

“There is not love of life without despair about life.”

“Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.”

“When Life does not find a singer to sing her heart she produces a philosopher to speak her mind.”

“The heart of life is a sphere quiet and serene, and the star that shines therein is fixed for evermore.”