A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity

No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him. There is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessed are the horny hands of toil.

Who is it needs such flawless shafts as fate? What archer of his arrows is so choice, or hits the white so surely?

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.

Practical application is the only mordant which will set things in the memory. Study without it is gymnastics, and not work, which alone will get intellectual bread.

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.

In all literary history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential.