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

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

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.

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.

Mithridates, he died old. Housman's passage is based on the belief of the ancients that Mithridates the Great [c. 135-63 B.C.] had so saturated his body with poisons that none could injure him. When captured by the Romans he tried in vain to poison himself, then ordered a Gallic mercenary to kill him.

The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.

Give me a land of boughs in leaf A land of trees that stand; Where trees are fallen there is grief; I love no leafless land.