“What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.”

“This son of his old age was yet more dear— Less from instinctive tenderness, the same Fond spirit that blindly works in the blood of all— 145Than that a child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts, And stirrings of inquietude, when they By tendency of nature needs must fail.”

“The mind of man is a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells.”

“Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.”

“One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.”

“The man who indulges us in this natural passion, who invites us into his heart, who, as it were, sets open the gates of his breast to us, seems to exercise a species of hospitality more delightful than any other. No man, who is in ordinary good temper, can fail of pleasing, if he has the courage to utter his real sentiments as he feels them, and because he feels them.”

“If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the house of man.”