How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?

Your dunce who can't do his sums always has a taste for the infinite.

... indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable.

Things are achieved when they are well begun.

The early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult,--whether that of a shrimp pool or of deeper water,--which afterwards subside into cheerful peace.

This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger in it.

Children demand that their heroes should be freckle less, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.