The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.

What has been done in the world - the works of genius - cost nothing. There is no painful effort, but it is the spontaneous flowing of the thought. Shakespeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest.

History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought.

We aim above the mark, to hit the mark. Every act hath some falsehood of exaggeration in it.

When summer opens, I see how fast it matures, and fear it will be short; but after the heats of July and August, I am reconciled, like one who has had his swing, to the cool of autumn.

A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.

The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,--faint copies of an invisible archetype.