And silence sounds no worse than cheers After earth has stopped the ears.

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.

Three minutes thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

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

And how am I to face the odds Of man's bedevilment and God's? I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made.

Why, if 'tis dancing you would be, There's brisker pipes than poetry. Say, for what were hop-yards meant, Or why was Burton built on Trent? Oh many a peer of England brews Livelier liquor than the Muse, And malt does more than Milton can To justify God's ways to man. Ale, man, ale's the stuff to drink For fellows whom it hurts to think: Look into the pewter pot To see the world as the world's not.

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.