No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

That meddling in other people's affairs...formerly conducted by the most discreet intrigue is now openly advocated under the name of intervention.

Hurry up, please, its time.

We can at least try to understand our own motives, passions, and prejudices, so as to be conscious of what we are doing when we apeal to those of others. This is very difficult, because our own prejudice and emotional bias always seems to us so rational.

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.

They don't understand what it is to be awake, / To be living on several planes at once / Though one cannot speak with several voices at once.