"I am not in the habit of grudging people their good things, but I wish I had written those lines." - On Barbauld's poem "Life"
"I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility; the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of re-action, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind ."
"With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things."
"Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?"
"There are no colours in the fairest sky So fair as these. The feather whence the pen Was shaped that traced the lives of these good men "
