Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.

Religion is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling

History - a vast Mississippi of falsehoods

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

Spare me the whispering, crowded room, the friends who come and gape and go, the ceremonious air of gloom - all, which makes death a hideous show.

Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity.