“But yester-night I prayed aloud In anguish and in agony, Up-starting from the fiendish crowd Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me: A lurid light, a trampling throng, Sense of intolerable wrong, And whom I scorned, those only strong! Thirst of revenge, the powerless will Still baffled, and yet burning still! Desire with loathing strangely mixed On wild or hateful objects fixed. Fantastic passions! maddening brawl! And shame and terror over all! Deeds to be hid which were not hid, Which all confused I could not know Whether I suffered, or I did: For all seemed guilt, remorse or woe, My own or others still the same Life-stifling fear, soul-stifling shame.”

“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke - Aye! and what then?”

“Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me. ”

“Friendship is a sheltering tree.”

“Love is flower like Friendship is like a sheltering tree.”

“Works of imagination should be written in very plain language the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.”

“Talent, lying in the understanding, is often inherited; genius, being the action of reason or imagination, rarely or never.”

“The most happy marriage I can picture or imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.”

“All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.”

“To most men experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illuminate only the track it has passed.”

“Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.”