“Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.”

“Of love it may be said, the less earthly the less demonstrative. In its absolutely indestructible form it reaches a profundity in which all exhibition of itself is painful.”

“Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.”

“there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would had disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there”

“On a Fine Morning” in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)WHENCE comes Solace?--Not from seeingWhat is doing, suffering, being,Not from noting Life’s conditions,Nor from heeding Time’s monitions; But in cleaving to the Dream, And in gazing at the gleam Whereby gray things golden seem. This do I this heyday, holdingShadows but as lights unfolding,As no specious show this momentWith its iris-hued embowment; But as nothing other than Part of a benignant plan; Proof that earth was made for man.”

“The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.”

“Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers. But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more. And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.”