The only joy in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine.

I am grown by sympathy a little eager and sentimental, but leave me alone, and I should relish every hour and what it brought me, the pot-luck of the day, as heartily as the oldest gossip in the bar-room.

All nobility in its beginnings was somebody's natural superiority.

What is originality? It is being one's self, and reporting accurately what we see and are.

The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem.

The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, "the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life,--we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us.