“And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.”

Joy comes and goes, hope ebbs and flows Like the wave; Change doth unknit the tranquil strength of men. Love tends life a little grace, A few sad smiles; and then, Both are laid in one cold place, In the grave.

However, if I shall live to be eighty I shall probably be the only person left in England who reads anything but newspapers and scientific publications.

Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things.

Time may restore us in his course Goethe’s sage mind and Byron’s force: But where will Europe’s latter hour Again find Wordsworth’s healing power?

The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.

Culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Not deep the poet sees, but wide.

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.

Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirred; And weep, and feel the fullness of the past, The years that are not more.

And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well — but ’tis not true!

O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

I often think flowers are the angels’ alphabet whereby they write on hills and fields mysterious and beautiful lessons for us to feel and learn.

Goodness is beauty in the best estate.

Fire delight burning bright, full of beauty glimmering ruby.

All dreams of the soul End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body.

Beautiful woman are like bees, stuck in their own honey.

If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.