And lo, the Hospital, gray, quiet, old, Where life and death like friendly chafferers meet.

This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.

Open your heart and take us in, Love-love and me.

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.

Behold me waiting—waiting for the knife.... The thick, sweet mystery of chloroform, The drunken dark, the little death-in-life.... [F]ace to face with chance, I shrink a little: My hopes are strong, my will is something weak. ...I am ready But, gentlemen my porters, life is brittle: You carry Cæsar and his fortunes—steady!

A late lark twitters from the quiet skies.

Men may scoff, and men may pray, But they pay Every pleasure with a pain.