Source identified
“Secrets lurk on all sides.”
The brief line frames observation as discovery: familiar landscapes still contain details that reward patience, questions, and repeated looking.
Source note: Wake-Robin; the phrase belongs to Burroughs’s description of the naturalist’s expectant attention to the world nearby.
Source identified
“Thus meet we five, in this still place, At this point of time, at this point in space.”
The speaker's quiet encounter with small nocturnal creatures is fixed to one precise moment and place, making attention itself the poem's central event.
Source note: “An August Midnight,” Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), Project Gutenberg #3168. The five include the speaker and small creatures gathered around his writing table.
Source identified
“But nature is a stranger yet; The ones that cite her most Have never passed her haunted house, Nor simplified her ghost.”
Even close observers do not fully explain nature in this ending; familiarity with natural objects leaves room for strangeness, uncertainty and intellectual humility.
Source note: “A Well,” Poems: Third Series (1896), Project Gutenberg #12242. The ghost and haunted-house language is metaphorical, emphasizing nature's unresolved mystery.
Source identified
“Expectation is ever on tiptoe.”
Curiosity keeps the observer mentally ready because the next small discovery may appear before it can be predicted or scheduled.
Source note: Wake-Robin; Burroughs describes the anticipatory state created by close engagement with birds, seasons, and other natural signs.
Source identified
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”
Keats opens the poem by claiming that beauty can continue to give delight beyond the instant in which it is first encountered.
Source note: Endymion, Book I, opening line; Project Gutenberg #24280. This is a poetic proposition within a Romantic work, not an empirical rule that every aesthetic experience remains pleasurable forever.
Source identified
“The poetry of earth is ceasing never.”
Keats closes the sonnet by insisting that nature’s music changes performers with the seasons but never truly stops.
Source note: On the Grasshopper and Cricket, final line; the cricket continues the earth’s poetry in winter.