It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.

How I do love the earth. I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it.

It may be glorious to write Thoughts that shall glad the two or three High souls, like those far stars that come in sight Once in a century.

Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.

There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.

Over all life broods Poesy, like the calm blue sky with its motherly, rebuking face. She is the great reformer, and where the love of her is strong and healthy, wickedness and wrong cannot long prevail.

They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.