Life, Struck Sharp On Death, Makes Awful

The Critics Could Never Mortify Me Out Of Heart - Because I Love Poetry For Its Own Sake, - And, Tho' With No Stoicism And Some Ambition, Care More For My Poems Than For My Poetic Reputation.

And Yet, Because I Love Thee, I Obtain From That Same Love This Vindicating Grace, To Live On Still In Love, And Yet In Vain

We Get No Good By Being Ungenerous, Even To A Book, And Calculating Profits--so Much Help By So Much Reading. It Is Rather When We Gloriously Forget Ourselves, And Plunge Soul-forward, Headlong, Into A Book's Profound, Impassioned For Its Beauty, And Salt Of Truth-- 'tis Then We Get The Right Good From A Book.

A Woman Cannot Do The Thing She Ought, Which Means Whatever Perfect Thing She Can, In Life, In Art, In Science, But She Fears To Let The Perfect Action Take Her Part And Rest There: She Must Prove What She Can Do Before She Does It, -- Prate Of Woman's Rights, Of Woman's Mission, Woman's Function, Till The Men (who Are Prating, Too, On Their Side) Cry, A Woman's Function Plainly Is... To Talk. Poor Souls, They Are Very Reasonably Vexed!

Every Age, Through Being Beheld Too Close, Is Ill-discerned By Those Who Have Not Lived Past It.