Ancestral Spirits

Famous quotes containing the words ancestral and/or spirits:

“Children, behold the Chimpanzee:
He sits on the ancestral tree
From which we sprang in ages gone.”
—Oliver Herford (1863–1935)

“But seldom the laurel wreath is seen
Unmixed with pensive pansies dark;
There’s a light and a shadow on every man
Who at last attains his lifted mark—
Nursing through night the ethereal spark.
Elate he never can be;
He feels that spirits which glad had hailed his worth,
Sleep in oblivion.—The shark
Glides white through the phosphorus sea.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)