Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.

The rainy Pleiads wester Orion plunges prone, And midnight strikes and hastens, And I lie down alone.

The troubles of our proud and angry dust are from eternity, and shall not fail. Bear them we can, and if we can we must. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.

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.

We now to peace and darkness And earth and thee restore Thy creature that thou madest And wilt cast forth no more.

And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.

The average man, if he meddles with criticism at all, is a conservative critic.