Good religious poetry... is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminately relished by the undevout.

I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.

The thoughts of others Were light and fleeting, Of lovers' meeting Or luck or fame. Mine were of trouble, And mine were steady; So I was ready When trouble came.

All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, and we were young.

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, the happy highways where I went and cannot come again.