My garden all is overblown with roses,/ My spirit all is overblown with rhyme.

I suppose the pleasure of the country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live. That is a truism when said, but anything but a truism when daily observed. Nothing shows up the difference between the thing said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.

I cannot bear that you / Should think me faithful, when I am untrue.

I do not like January very much. It is too stationary. Not enough happens. I like the evidences of life, and in January there are too few of them.

There is always something else to do. A gardener should have nine times as many lives as a cat.

how poor and disheartening a thing is experience compared with hope!

There are no signposts in the sea.