An electric chain seems to vibrate, as it were, between our brain and him or her preserved there [in a Daguerreotype] so well by the limner's cunning. Time, space, both are annihilated, and we identify the semblance with the reality.

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

I henceforth tread the world, chaste, temperate, an early riser, a steady grower.

The moon gives you light, and the bugles and the drums give you music, and my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans, my heart gives you love.

Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.

There was a child went forth everyday, And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or dread, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day... or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.