Madam Life's a piece in bloom Death goes dogging everywhere: she's the tenant of the room, he's the ruffian on the stair.

A late lark twitters from the quiet skies.

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

The nightingale has a lyre of gold, The lark's is a clarion call, And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute, But I love him best of all. For his song is all the joy of life, And we in the mad spring weather, We two have listened till he sang Our hearts and lips together.

Now, to read poetry at all is to have an ideal anthology of one's own, and in that possession to be incapable of content with the anthologies of all the world besides.

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!