“I live not in myself, but I becomePortion of that around me: and to meHigh mountains are a feeling, but the humof human cities torture.”

“Are not the mountains, waves, and skies as much a part of me, as I of them?”

“The stars are forth, the moon above the topsOf the snow-shining mountains.—Beautiful!I linger yet with Nature, for the nightHath been to me a more familiar faceThan that of man; and in her starry shadeOf dim and solitary loveliness,I learn'd the language of another world.”

“They accuse me--Me--the present writer ofThe present poem--of--I know not what,--A tendency to under-rate and scoffAt human power and virtue, and all that;And this they say in language rather rough.Good God! I wonder what they would be at!I say no more than has been said in Dante'sVerse, and by Solomon and by Cervantes;By Swift, by Machiavel, by Rochefoucault;By Fenelon, by Luther and by Plato;By Tillotson, and Wesley, and Rousseau,Who knew this life was not worth a potato.'Tis not their fault, nor mine, if this be so--For my part, I pretend not to be Cato,Nor even Diogenes.--We live and die, But which is best, you know no more than I.”

“Tis to create, and in creating live        A being more intense, that we endow        With form our fancy, gaining as we give        The life we image, even as I do now.        What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou,        Soul of my thought! with whom I traverse earth,        Invisible but gazing, as I glow        Mix'd with thy spirit, blended with thy birth,And feeling still with thee in my crush'd feelings' dearth.”

“Oh could I feel as I have felt,-or be what I have been,Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanish'd scene;As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be,So midst the wither'd waste of life, those tears would flow to me.”

“If I could always read I should never feel the want of company.”