The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.

One gets to the heart of the matter by a series of experiences in the same pattern, but in different colors.

Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.

The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter, So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly Singing about her head, as she rode by.

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age).

Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.