Experience takes dreadfully high school-wages, but he teaches like no other.

It is a strange trade that of advocacy. Your intellect, your highest heavenly gift is hung up in the shop window like a loaded pistol for sale.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall -- which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.

Are not our greatest men as good as lost? The men that walk daily among us, warming us, feeding us, walk shrouded in darkness, mere mythic men.

Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions. America, too, will have to strain its energies, crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons, and mud-demons, before it can become a babitation for the gods.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.