Humor is also a way of saying something serious.
We fight to keep something alive rather than in the expectation that anything will triumph.
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it
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.