“Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,Half wishing they were dead to save the shame.The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow;They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats,And flare up bodily, wings and all. What then?Who's sorry for a gnat... or a girl?”

“My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!And yet they seem alive and quiveringAgainst my tremulous hands which loose the stringAnd let them drop down on my knee to-night.This said, -- he wished to have me in his sightOnce, as a friend: this fixed a day in springTo come and touch my hand ... a simple thing,Yet I wept for it! -- this, ... the paper's light ...Said, Dear I love thee; and I sank and quailedAs if God's future thundered on my past.This said, I am thine -- and so its ink has paledWith lying at my heart that beat too fast.And this ... O Love, thy words have ill availedIf, what this said, I dared repeat at last!”

“XII sang his name instead of song;Over and over I sang his name:Backward and forward I sang it along,With my sweetest notes, it was still the same!I sang it low, that the slave-girls nearMight never guess, from what they could hear,That all the song was a name.”

“Enough! we're tired, my heart and I.We sit beside the headstone thus,And wish that name were carved for us.The moss reprints more tenderlyThe hard types of the mason's knife,As Heaven's sweet life renews earth's lifeWith which we're tired, my heart and I ....In this abundant earth no doubtIs little room for things worn out:Disdain them, break them, throw them by!And if before the days grew roughWe once were loved, used, - well enough,I think, we've fared, my heart and I.”

“What is art but the life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?”

“You were made perfectly to be loved and surely I have loved you in the idea of you my whole life long. ”

“Why, what is to live? Not to eat and drink and breathe,—but to feel the life in you down all the fibres of being, passionately and joyfully.”