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?

Friendships begin with liking or gratitude- roots that can be pulled up.

I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me

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.

But, bless us, things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome, I hope?