As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams.

Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of.

Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.

We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare, More substance in our enmities Than in our love

A sea captain when he stands upon the bridge, or looks out from his deck-house, thinks much about God and about the world. Away in the valley yonder among the corn and the poppies men may well forget all things except the warmth of the sun upon the face, and the kind shadow under the hedge; but he who journeys through storm and darkness must needs think and think.

How but in custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?

How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart.