It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all history.

When we attempt to define and describe God, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.

Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?

Truth is too simple for us: we do not like those who unmask our illusions.

God never jests with us, and will not compromise the end of nature, by permitting any inconsequence in its procession.

I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?

I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.