The sweetest souls, like the sweetest flowers, soon canker in cities, and no purity is rarer there than the purity of delight.

I hate false words, and seek with care, difficulty, and moroseness, those that fit the thing.

The wise become as the unwise in the enchanted chambers of Power, whose lamps make every face the same colour.

Vast objects of remote altitude must be looked at a long while before they are ascertained. Ages are the telescope tubes that must be lengthened out for Shakespeare; and generations of men serve but a single witness to his claims.

No good writer was ever long neglected; no great man overlooked by men equally great. Impatience is a proof of inferior strength, and a destroyer of what little there may be.

God scatters beauty as he scatters flowers O'er the wide earth, and tells us all are ours. A hundred lights in every temple burn, And at each shrine I bend my knee in turn.

Cruelty, if we consider it as a crime, is the greatest of all; if we consider it as a madness, we are equally justifiable in applying to it the readiest and the surest means of oppression.