Much verse fails of being poetry because it was not written exactly at the right crisis, though it may have been inconceivably near to it. It is only by a miracle that poetry is written at all. It is not recoverable thought, but a hue caught from a vaster receding thought.

By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.

If you will not try, you will go to your grave with your song still inside you.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

A man's interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.

I think that Nature meant kindly when she made our brothers few. However, my voice is still for peace.

It is said that a rogue does not look you in the face, neither does an honest man look at you as if he had his reputation to establish.