*****

Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.

*****

It is one of the most common forms of depreciation to throw cold water
on the whole by adroit over-commendation of a part, since everything
worth judging, whether it be a man, a work of art, or only a fine city,
must be judged upon its merits as a whole.

*****

I wonder, would a negative be found enticing? for, from the negative
point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp.
Although it runs to considerably over a hundred pages, it contains not
a single reference to the imbecility of God's universe, nor so much as a
single hint that I could have made a better one myself--I really do not
know where my head can have been.

*****

It's deadly commonplace, but, after all, the commonplaces are the great
poetic truths.

*****

Those who try to be artists use, time after time, the matter of their
recollections, setting and resetting little coloured memories of men and
scenes, rigging up (it may be) some especial friend in the attire of a
buccaneer, and decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or murder to be done, on
the playground of their youth. But the memories are a fairy gift which
cannot be worn out in using. After a dozen services in various tales,
the little sunbright pictures of the past still shine in the mind's eye
with not a lineament defaced, not a tint impaired. GLUCK UND UNGLUCK
WIRD GESANG, if Goethe pleases; yet only by endless avatars, the
original re-embodying after each. So that a writer, in time, begins to
wonder at the perdurable life of these impressions; begins, perhaps,
to fancy that he wrongs them when he weaves them in with fiction; and
looking back on them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at last,
substantive jewels, in a setting of their own.

*****

Place them in a hospital, put them in a jail in yellow overalls, do what
you will, young Jessamy finds young Jenny.

*****

'You fret against the common law,' I said. 'You rebel against the
voice of God, which He has made so winning to convince, so imperious
to command. Hear it, and how it speaks between us! Your hand clings to
mine, your heart leaps at my touch, the unknown elements of which we
are compounded awake and run together at a look; the clay of the earth
remembers its independent life, and yearns to join us; we are drawn
together as the stars are turned about in space, or as the tides ebb and
flow; by things older and greater