“Why don't you go on, Mother dear?' he asked. 'It's such nonsense!' said his mother. 'I believe it would go on for ever.' 'That's just what it did,' said Diamond.' 'What did?' she asked.' 'Why, the river. That's almost the very tune it used to sing.”

“I wish I had [made that song]. No, I don't That would be to take it from somebody else. But it's mine for all that.''What makes it yours?''I love it so.''Does loving a thing make it yours?''I think so, Mother -- at least more than anything else can. . . . Love makes the only myness,' said Diamond.”

“That's a poet.''I thought you said it was a bo-at.''Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?''Why, a thing to sail on the water in.''Well, perhaps you're not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea....'...'A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too.”

“I am always hearing. . . the sound of a far off song. I do not exactly know where it is, or what it means; and I don't hear much of it, only the odour of its music, as it were, flitting across the great billows of the ocean outside this air in which I make such a storm; but what I do hear, is quite enough to make me able to bear the cry from the drowning ship. So it would you if you could hear it.''No it wouldn't,' returned Diamond stoutly. 'For they wouldn't hear the music of the far-away song; and if they did, it wouldn't do them any good. You see you and I are not going to be drowned, and so we might enjoy it.''But you have never heard the psalm, and you don't know what it is like. Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all the cries. . . . It wouldn't be the song it seems if it did not swallow up all their fear and pain too, and set them singing it themselves with all the rest.”

“Have you forgiven me?' I asked.'How can I say I have, when I never had anything to forgive?''Well then, I must go unforgiven for I cannot forgive myself.' I said.'O Mrs. Percivale! If you think how the world is flooded withforgiveness, you will just dip in your cup, and take what you want.”

“But he remembered that even if she did box his ears, he musn't box hers again, for she was a girl, and all that boys must do, if girls are rude, is to go away and leave them.”

“He was dimly angry with himself, he did not know why. It was that he had struck his wife. He had forgotten it, but was miserable about it, notwithstanding. And this misery was the voice of the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond, speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. On Mount Sinai, it was thunder; in the cabman's heart it was misery; in the soul of St John it was perfect blessedness.”