George MacDonald

From Eden's bowers the full-fed rivers flow,
To guide the outcasts to the land of woe:
Our Earth one little toiling streamlet yields,
To guild the wanderers to the happy fields.

—George MacDonald, epigraph to Phantastes ch X.

From dreams of bliss shall men awake
One day, but not to weep:
The dreams remain; they only break
The mirror of the sleep.

—George MacDonald, epigraph to Phantastes ch XVIII, adapted from Jean Paul's Hesperus:

Ja es wird zwar ein anderes Zeitalter kommen, woes Licht wird, und wo der Mensch aus erhabnen Traümen erwacht, und die Traüme—wieder findet weil er nichts verlor als den Schlaf.

Adelaide

Alas, how easily things go wrong!
A sigh too much, or a kiss too long,
And there follows a mist and a weeping rain,
And life is never the same again.

Alas, how hardly things go right!
'Tis hard to watch in a summer night,
For the sigh will come, and the kiss will stay,
And the summer night is a wintry day.

— George MacDonald, Phantastes ch XIX.

And yet how easily things go right,
If the sigh and a kiss of a summer's night
Come deep from the soul in the stronger ray
That is born in the light of the winter's day.

And things can never go badly wrong
If the heart be true and the love be strong,
For the mist, if it comes, and the weeping rain
Will be changed by the love into sunshine again.

— Lorettus S. Metcalf, The Forum