“Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.”

“It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.”

“Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.”

“It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.”

“If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.”

“The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.”

“To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.”