It is sublime as night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics, which visit in turn each noble poetic mind .... It is of no use to put away the book if I trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond. Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently: eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence .... This is her creed. Peace, she saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment - these panaceas expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude of the Eight Gods.

What is there in 'Paradise Lost' to elevate and astonish like Herschel or Somerville?

I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of redemption absolutely incredible

I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him.

Every man I meet is in some way my superior, and in that, I can learn of him.

Sunshine cannot bleach the snow, Nor time unmake what poets know.

I hung my verse in the wind Time and tide their faults will find.

So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person’s genius is confined to a very few hours.

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

The poor, short lone fact dies at birth. Memory catches it up into her heaven and bathes it in immortal waters.