Poets should be law-givers; that is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, but should announce and lead the civil code, and the day's work.

The exceptional life depends not on working harder, but on different, even opposite, actions from habit and the crowd.

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

The people are to be taken in very small doses.

Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can't in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories.

But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power.

When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with His presence.