There are men whose presence infuses trust and reverence.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

Well, I aren't like a bird-clapper, forced to make a rattle when the wind blows on me. I can keep my own counsel when there's no good i' speaking.

People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.

How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?

Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?