To hear that your neighbor was worse off than yourself was not an altogether unpleasant experience.

For poetry, more than any other art, except music, has a compelling hold upon the spiritual side of life.

None of us ever escape the first few years of our lives. They make a mould into which we are cast, and though it may be broken, and we turned loose, some remnant of it, some intangible evil or lovely thing or both, will remain with us, like the odor to a flower, or the smoothness to a piece of ivory. It is part of the immortality of youth.

A child without an acquaintance of some kind with a classic of literature ... suffers from that impoverishment for the rest of his life. No later intimacy is like that of the first.

The old faiths light their candles all about, but burly Truth comes by and puts them out.