O daisy mine, what will it be to look / From God's side even of such a simple thing?

With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the bell. The inarticulate bell has found too much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature.

It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, when Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature.

A wall is the safeguard of simplicity.

There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a child's foot runs.

recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind.

In childhood we all have ... a far higher sensibility for April and April evenings - a heartache for them, which in riper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled.