Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

Time is the silent, never-resting thing ... rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing oceantide, on which we and all the universe swim.

The greatest of all heroes is One--whom we do not name here! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter; you will find it the ultimate perfection of a principle extant throughout man's whole history on earth.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.

No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag his pen, without saying something.

Alas! while the body stands so broad and brawny, must the soul lie blinded, dwarfed, stupefied, almost annihilated? Alas! this was, too, a breath of God, bestowed in heaven, but on earth never to be unfolded!