Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature’s common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mound of countless generations, and not from any top dressing capriciously scattered over the surface.
Earth’s biggest country ‘s gut her soul, An’ risen up earth’s greatest nation.
The wisest man could ask no more of fate Than to be simple, modest, manly, true, Safe from the many, honored by the few; Nothing to court in Church, or World, or State, But inwardly in secret to be great.
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past.
Life seems a jest of Fate’s contriving.
I love her with a love as still As a broad river’s peaceful might, Which by high tower and lowly mill, Goes wandering at its own will, And yet does ever flow aright.
Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the “Faery Queen.”
It may be glorious to write Thoughts that shall glad the two or three High souls, like those far stars that come in sight Once in a century.
Not only around our infancy Doth heaven with all its splendors lie; Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, We Sinais climb and know it not.
Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch’s men talked with us face to face.
He gives us the very quintessence of perception,-the clearly crystalized precipitation of all that is most precious in the ferment of impression after the impertinent and obtrusive particulars have evaporated from the memory.
Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean.
Hush! Still as death, The tempest holds his breath As from a sudden will; The rain stops short, but from the eaves You see it drop, and hear it from the leaves, All is so bodingly still...
The pale and quiet moon Makes her calm forehead bare, And the last fragments of the storm, Like shattered rigging from a fight at sea, Silent and few, are drifting over me.
It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.
Sentiment is intellectualized emotion; emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.
For men in earnest have no time to waste In patching fig-leaves for the naked truth.
I tell ye wut, my judgment is you’re pooty sure to fail, Ez long ‘z the head keeps turnin’ back for counsel to the the tail.
How I do love the earth. I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it.
My soul is not a palace of the past...
The victory’s in believing.