"Life is made up of vanities — so small, So mean, the common history of the day, — That mockery seems the sole philoso…"

"Few know the demands made by the imagination on those who are once its masters and its victims. Its exercise is so fe…"

"We might have been !—these are but common words, And yet they make the sum of life's bewailing;"

"… if there be one torture which the demons, who delight in human misery, might, rejoice to inflict, it is the anxious…"

"Who ever said one-half of all that seemed in absence so easy to say ?"

"But there always is in my mind something at once ludicrous and mournful in a crowd congregated for the purpose of amu…"

"There is an awe about death, even in the face the most familiar to us; it has already taken its likeness from the her…"

"To find that you have been deceived, where you trusted so entirely ; trifled with, where all your deepest and sweetes…"

"[From Lady Marchmont’s journal]: Will the time ever come, when men will feel that the mind and the heart must work in…"

"There are times when the poet marvels how he ever wrote, and feels as if he never could write again."