Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

The mortal sickness of a mind too unhappy to be kind.

Earth and high heaven are fixed of old and founded strong.

In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning.

I think that to transfuse emotion - not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer - is the peculiar function of poetry.

Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.