Eliza Cook (1818–89) was an English author, Chartist poet and writer born in London Road, Southwark. Eliza Cook was the youngest of the eleven children of a brasier living in London Road, Southwark. When she was about nine years old her father retired from business, and the family went to live at a small farm in St. Leonard’s Forest, near Horsham. Her mother encouraged Eliza’s fondness for imaginative literature, but the child was almost entirely self-educated. She began to write verses before she was fifteen; indeed, some of her most popular poems, such as ‘I’m afloat’ and the ‘Star of Glengarry,’ were composed in her girlhood.
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I miss thee, my Mother! Thy image is still
The deepest impressed on my heart.
—Eliza Cook
Topics: Mothers
A cheer, then, for the noble breast that fears not danger’s post; And like the lifeboat, proves a friend, When friends are wanted most.
—Eliza Cook
Topics: Friendship
Better build schoolrooms for “the boy,” than cells and gibbets for “the man.”
—Eliza Cook
Topics: Education
Exaggeration misleads the credulous and offends the perceptive.
—Eliza Cook
Topics: Exaggeration
The span of life is waning fast; Beware, unthinking youth, beware! Thy soul’s eternity depends Upon the record moments bear.
—Eliza Cook
Topics: The Present
Who would not rather trust and be deceived?
—Eliza Cook
Topics: Trust
O God, how beautiful the thought, how merciful the blest decree, that grace can always be found when sought, and nought shut out the soul from thee.
—Eliza Cook
Topics: Mercy
On what strange stuff Ambition feeds!
—Eliza Cook
Topics: Oddity, Peculiarity
Though language forms the preacher, ‘Tis “good works” make the man.
—Eliza Cook
Topics: Deeds, Good Deeds, Goodness
Why should we strive, with cynic frown, to knock their fairy castles down?
—Eliza Cook
Topics: Idealism, Ideals
Oh, how cruelly sweet are the echoes that start when memory plays an old tune on the heart!
—Eliza Cook
Topics: Memory
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