Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

The Spartan, smiting and spurning the wretched Helot, moves our disgust. But the same Spartan, calmly dressing his hair, and uttering his concise jests, on what the well knows to be his last day, in the pass of Thermopylae, is not to be contemplated without admiration.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature,--endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity.

As freedom is the only safeguard of governments, so are order and moderation generally necessary to preserve freedom.

We must judge of a form of government by it's general tendency, not by happy accidents

Those who seem to load the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing.