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The Widow Of Crescentius : Part I.

'Midst Tivoli's luxuriant glades,
Bright-foaming falls, and olive shades,
Where dwelt, in days departed long,
The sons of battle and of song,
No tree, no shrub its foliage rears,
But o'er the wrecks of other years,
Temples and domes, which long have been
The soil of that enchanted scene.

There the wild fig-tree and the vine
O'er Hadrian's mouldering villa twine;
The cypress, in funeral grace,
Usurps the vanished column's place;
O'er fallen shrine and ruined frieze
The wall-flower rustles in the breeze;
Acanthus-leaves the marble hide
They once adorned in sculptured pride;
And nature hath resumed her throne
O'er the vast works of ages flown.

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poem by Felicia Dorothea Hemans
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Nothing is slower than the true birth of a man.

Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian
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Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul.

Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian
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There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty.

Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian
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Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one's self without thought of profit.

Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian
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The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.

Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian
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The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their neglect.

Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian
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Adrian's Address to His Soul When Dying

Ah! gentle, fleeting, wav'ring sprite,
Friend and associate of this clay!
To what unknown region borne,
Wilt thou now wing thy distant flight?
No more with wonted humour gay,
But pallid, cheerless, and forlorn.

poem by Hadrian, translated by Byron
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The technique of a great seducer requires a facility and an indifference in passing from one object of affection to another which I could never have; however that may be, my loves have left me more often than I have left them, for I have never been able to understand how one could have enough of any beloved. The desire to count up exactly the riches which each new love brings us, and to see it change, and perhaps watch it grow old, accords ill with multiplicity of conquests.

Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian
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The founding of libraries was like constructing more public granaries, amassing reserves against a spiritual winter which by certain signs, in spite of myself, I see ahead.

Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)
Added by Dan Costinaş
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