Knowledge is to be acquired only by a corresponding experience. How can we know what we are told merely? Each man can interpret another's experience only by his own.

Improve every opportunity to be melancholy.

If Columbus was the first to discover the islands, Americus Vespucius and Cabot, and the Puritans, and we their descendants, havediscovered only the shores of America.

Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes.

We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we.

The virtue of making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before does not begin to be superhuman.

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us.