He [the translator] will find one English book and one only, where, as in the Iliad itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.

Her cabined, ample spirit It fluttered and failed for breath. Tonight it doth inherit The vasty hall of death.

Hither and thither spins The windborne, mirroring soul; A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole.

I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.

I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world .

In poetry, no less than in life, he is ‘a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain’.

Is it so small a thing To have enjoyed the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done; To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes?

It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.