Lyrical poetry is much the same an every age, as the songs of the nightingales in every spring-time.

Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak and to speak well are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.

My heart resembles the ocean; has storm, and ebb and flow; and many a beautiful pearl lies hid in its depths below.

With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing-gown he patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe.

Nothing is sillier than this charge of plagiarism. There is no sixth commandment in art. The poet dare help himself wherever he lists, wherever he finds material suited to his work. He may even appropriate entire columns with their carved capitals, if the temple he thus supports be a beautiful one. Goethe understood this very well, and so did Shakespeare before him.

Out of my own great woe I make my little songs.

Perfumes are the feelings of flowers, and as the human heart, imagining itself alone and unwatched, feels most deeply in the night-time, so seems it as if the flowers, in musing modesty, await the mantling eventide ere they give themselves up wholly to feeling...