John Keats

How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world improve a sense of its natural beauties upon us. Like poor Falstaff, although I do not 'babble,' I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have know from my infancy - their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with superhuman fancy.

And then there crept A little noiseless noise among the leaves, Born of the very sigh that silence heaves.

E'en like the passage of an angel's tear That falls through the clear ether silently.

There is no heroic poem in the world but is at bottom a biography, the life of a man; also it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.

There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.

Asleep in lap of legends old.

One life,-a little gleam of time between two Eternities.

Literary men are . . . a perpetual priesthood.

Literature is the Thought of thinking Souls.

Love in a hut, with water and crust, Is-Love, forgive us!-cinders, ashes, dust; Love in a palace is perhaps at last More grievous torment than a hermit's fast.