"Think'st thou there are no serpents in the world But those who slide along the grassy sod, And sting the luckless foot that presses them? There are who in the path of social life Do bask their spotted skins in Fortune's sun, And sting the soul."

"A willing heart adds feather to the heel, And makes the clown a winged Mercury."

"Again she plunges! hark! a second shock Bilges the splitting vessel on the rock; Down on the vale of death, with dismal cries, The fated victims shuddering cast their eyes In wild despair; while yet another stroke With strong convulsion rends the solid oak: Ah Heaven!—behold her crashing ribs divide! She loosens, parts, and spreads in ruin o'er the tide."

"High in his chariot glow'd the lamp of day."

"The sacred lamp of day Now dipt in western clouds his parting ray."

"With living colours give my verse to glow: The sad memorial of a tale of woe!"

"Thou living ray of intellectual fire."

"For honesty is before honor; and though man must write his poems in sounding words, God's poems are printed best in the brave and silent duties of common life."

"Let not thy peace depend on the tongues of men; for whether they judge well of thee or ill, thou art not on that account other than thyself. Where are true peace and true glory? Are they not in God?"

"Men of Harlech! On to glory, See your banner, famed in story, Waves these burning words before ye, "Britain scorns to yield!""

"Now Spring returns; but not to me returns."

"'Tis very vain for me to boast How small a price my Bible cost, The day of judgment will make clear 'Twas very cheap — or very dear,"

"In every pang that rends the heart The Man of Sorrows had a part"

"From old foundations where the nation rears Her darlings, came that flower of England's youth And here in latest teens, or riper years, Stood drinking in all nobleness and truth."

"Were it not well then to begin with the substance, to learn to apprehend the reality of that kingdom which is all around us now, whether we recognize it or not—to take our aims and endeavors into it that they may be made part of it, however small—to surrender ourselves to it, that our lives may do something towards its advancement, and that so we may become fellow-workers, however humble, with all the wise and good who have gone before us, and with Him who made them what they were?"

"So full of power, yet blithe and debonair, Rallying his friends with pleasant banter gay, Or half a-dream chaunting with jaunty air Great words of Goethe, catch of Béranger."

"Believe in God, and bid all knowledge speed. Sooner or later the full harmony will reveal itself, the discords and contradictions disappear."

"That image, or rather that Person, so human, yet so entirely divine, has a power to fill the imagination, to arrest the affections, to deepen and purify the conscience, which nothing else in the world has."

"[T]he belief in a Divine education open to each man and to all men, takes up into itself all that is true in the end proposed by Culture, supplements and perfects it."

"Subtlest thought shall fail, and learning falter, Churches change, forms perish, systems go, But our human needs, they will not alter, Christ no after age shall e'er outgrow."

"[I]t is quite certain that if from childhood men were to begin to follow the first intimations of conscience, honestly to obey them and carry them out into act, the power of conscience would be so strengthened and improved within them, that it would soon become, what it evidently is intended to be, "a connecting principle between the creature and the Creator.""

"Not as men of science, not as critics, not as philosophers, but as little children, shall we enter into the kingdom of heaven."

"For with all our pretension to enlightenment, are we not now a talking, desultory, rather than a meditative generation?"

"The main condition is that the spiritual ear should be open to overhear and patiently take in, and the will ready to obey that testimony which, I believe, God bears in every human heart, however dull, to those great truths which the Bible reveals. This, and not logic, is the way to grow in religious knowledge, to know that the truths of religion are not shadows, but deep realities."

"The fact is, those root-truths, on which the foundations of our being rest, are apprehended not logically at all, but mystically. This faculty of spiritual apprehension, which is a very different one from those which are trained in schools and colleges, must be educated and fed, not less but more carefully than our lower faculties, else it will be starved and die, however learned and able in other respects we may become."

"We are not called on to believe this or that doctrine which may be proposed to us till we can do so from honest conviction. But we are called on to trust—to trust ourselves to God, being sure that He will lead us right—to keep close to Him—and to trust the promises which He whispers through our conscience; this we can do, and we ought to do."

"Criticism is not religion, and by no process can it be substituted for it. It is not the critic's eye but the child's heart that most truly discerns the countenance that looks out from the pages of the Gospel."

"Hidden from others do we know ourselves? Albeit the surface takes the common light; Who hath not felt that this our being shelves Down to abysses, dark and infinite?"

"They who seek religion for culture-sake are æsthetic, not religious, and will never gain that grace which religion adds to culture, because they never can have the religion."

"The sense that a man is serving a Higher than himself, with a service which will become ever more and more perfect freedom, evokes more profound, more humbling, more exalted emotions than any thing else in the world can do. The spirit of man is an instrument which cannot give out its deepest, finest tones, except under the immediate hand of the Divine Harmonist."

"So some small consciousness doth play On the surface of our being, but the broad And permanent foundations every way Pass into mystery, are hid in God."

"There is perhaps no truer sign that a man is really advancing than that he is learning to forget himself, that he is losing the natural thoughts about self in the thought of One higher than himself, to whose guidance he can commit himself and all men."

"The ground of all religion, that which makes it possible, is the relation in which the human soul stands to God."

"Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimate of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness."

"Beauty comes, we scarce know how, as an emanation from sources deeper than itself."

"Teach me. Lord, my true condition; Bring me childlike to Thy knee; Stripped of every low ambition, Willing to be led by Thee."

"Haste thee on from grace to glory, Armed by faith and winged by prayer, Heaven's eternal day's before thee; God's own hand shall guide thee there."

"Last words: "Peace! Joy!""

"A scrip on my back, and a staff in my hand, I march on in haste through an enemy's land; The road may be rough, but it cannot be long; And I'll smooth it with hope, and I'll cheer it with song."

"Let good or ill befall, It must be good for me,— Secure of having Thee in all, Of having all in Thee."

"I need Thy presence every passing hour; What, but Thy grace, can foil the tempter's power? Who, like Thyself, my guide and stay can be? Through cloud and sunshine, oh, abide with me!"

"Somewhere on the other side of this wide night and the distance between us, I am thinking of you. The room is turning slowly away from the moon."

"This is the word tightrope. Now imagine a man, inching across it in the space between our thoughts. He holds our breath.There is no word net.You want him to fall, don't you? I guessed as much; he teeters but succeeds. The word applause is written all over him."

"One saw I was alive. Loosened his belt. My bowels opened in a ragged gape of fear. Between the gap of corpses I could see a child. The soldiers laughed. Only a matter of days separate this from acts of torture now. They shot her in the eye."

"What do I have to help me, without spell or prayer, endure this hour, endless, heartless, anonymous, the death of love?"

"As anyone who has the slightest knowledge of my work knows, I have little in common with Larkin, who was tall, taciturn and thin-on-top, and unlike him I laugh, nay, sneer, in the face of death. I will concede one point: we are both lesbian poets."

"When you have a child, your previous life seems like someone else's. It's like living in a house and suddenly finding a room you didn't know was there, full of treasure and light."

"Light gatherer. You fell from a star into my lap, the soft lamp at the bedside mirrored in you, and now you shine like a snowgirl, a buttercup under a chin, the wide blue yonder you squeal at and fly in."