"I fear your kind and open communication, which has rendered me more painfully conscious of my own defects, has not improved me," sighed Kate.

Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.

Around and around the house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow.

Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.

Oh Agnes, Oh my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!

It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable, honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world, but it is very possible to know how it has touched one's self in going by.

To have a cricket on the hearth is the luckiest thing in all the world!