I am never indifferent, and never pretend to be, to what people say or think of my books. They are my children, and I like to have them liked.

Love gives itself; it is not bought.

Even He that died for us upon the cross, in the last hour, in the unutterable agony of death, was mindful of His mother, as if to teach us that this holy love should be our last worldly thought - the last point of earth from which the soul should take its flight for heaven.

There are things of which I may not speak; There are dreams that cannot die; There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak, And bring a pallor into the cheek, And a mist before the eye.

If I am not worth the wooing, I surely am not worth the winning!

In what a forge and what a heat were shaped the anchors of thy hope! Fear not each sudden sound and shock; 'Tis of the wave and not the rock.

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, Are merely shadows cast by outward things On stone or canvas, having in themselves No separate existence. Architecture, Existing in itself, and not in seeming A something it is not, surpasses them As substance shadow.