A man is known by the company his mind keeps.

Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct shadows to the generations following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.

After a debauch of thunder-shower, the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow.

What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.

Books that have become classics - books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal - always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.

The ocean moans over dead men's bones.

Those forms we fancy shadows, those strange lights That flash on dank morasses, the quick wind That smites us by the roadside—are the Night's Innumerable children. Unconfined By shroud or coffin, disembodied souls, Uneasy spirits, steal into the air From festering graveyards when the curfew tolls At the day's death... And wheresoever murders have been done, In stately palaces or lonesome woods, Where'er a soul has sold itself and lost Its high inheritance, there, hovering, broods Some sad, invisible, accurséd Ghost!