It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man's death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too.

Can any man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother.

It is a very good quality in a man to have a trout-stream.

Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and a great glibness of speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety?

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?

Man may content himself with the applause of the world and the homage paid to his intellect, but woman's heart has holier idols.

We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.