“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,And all the sweet serenity of books”

“Thus it is our daughters leave us, Those we love, and those who love us! Just when they have learned to help us, When we are old and lean upon them, Comes a youth with flaunting feathers, With his flute of reeds, a stranger Wanders piping through the village, Beckons to the fairest maiden, And she follows where he leads her, Leaving all things for the stranger!”

“Sweet as the tender fragrance that survives,When martyred flowers breathe out their little lives,Sweet as a song that once consoled our pain,But never will be sung to us again,Is they remembrance. Now the hour of restHath come to thee. Sleep, darling: it is best.”

“I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors.There is so much aspiration in them,so much audacious hope and trembling fear,so much of the heart's history, that all errorsand shortcomings are for a while lost sight ofin the amiable self assertion of youth.”

“If thou art worn and hard beset,With sorrows, that thou wouldst forget;If thou wouldst read a lesson, that will keepThy heart from fainting and thy soul from sleep,Go to the woods and hills! No tearsDim the sweet look that Nature wears.”

“Let us, then be up and doing,With a heart for any fate;Still achieving, still pursuing,Learn to labour and to wait.”

“Love gives itself; it is not bought.”