Though the Psalm of Life be shouted from Maine to California, that would not make it true poetry.
Longfellow has no imitators, for of echoes themselves there are no echoes and it is only style that makes a school.
Poe’s marvellous lines To Helen, a poem as beautiful as a Greek gem and as musical as Apollo’s lute.
Good novelists are much rarer than good sons, and none of us would part readily with Micawber and Mrs. Nickleby. Still, the fact remains that a man who was affectionate and loving to his children, generous and warm-hearted to his friends, and whose books are the very bacchanalia of benevolence, pilloried his parents to make the groundlings laugh, and this fact every biographer of Dickens should face and, if possible, explain.
No age ever borrows the slang of its predecessor.
What we do not know about Shakespeare is a most fascinating subject, and one that would fill a volume, but what we do know about him is so meagre and inadequate that when it is collected together the result is rather depressing.
They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study.
Rossetti’s was a great personality, and personalities such as his do not easily survive shilling primers.
We are sorry to find an English dramatic critic misquoting Shakespeare, as we had always been of opinion that this was a privilege reserved specially for our English actors.
Biographies of this kind rob life of much of its dignity and its wonder, add to death itself a new terror, and make one wish that all art were anonymous.