Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint.

It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of national literature on each other, to see the humor of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind.

I would hardly change the sorrowful words of the poets for their glad ones. Tears dampen the strings of the lyre, but they grow the tensor for it, and ring even the clearer and more ravishingly.

The greatest homage we can pay to truth, is to use it.

Two meanings have our lightest fantasies,- One of the flesh, and of the spirit one.

There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.