February... Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth, It kissed the forehead of the Earth, And smiled upon the silent sea, And bade the frozen streams be free, And waked to music all their fountains, And breathed upon the frozen mountains.

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.

Know ye what it is to be a child? It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief.

Whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit to sense, is useful.

A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.

God is a hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof; the onus probandi rests on the theist.