Part 75

Poetry is not made out of the understanding. The question of common sense is always: "What is it good for?" a question which would abolish the rose and be triumphantly answered by the cabbage.--Lowell.

The poetry of earth is never dead.--Keats.

~Poets.~--Poets, like race-horses, must be fed, not fattened.--Charles IX.

True poets, like great artists, have scarcely any childhood, and no old age.--Madame Swetchine.

Modern poets mix much water with their ink.--Goethe.

There is nothing of which Nature has been more bountiful than poets. They swarm like the spawn of cod-fish, with a vicious fecundity, that invites and requires destruction. To publish verses is become a sort of evidence that a man wants sense; which is repelled not by writing good verses, but by writing excellent verses.--Sydney Smith.

There is a pleasure in poetic pains which only poets know.--Wordsworth.

An artist that works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thoughts in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling.--Holmes.

A little shallowness might be useful to many a poet! What is depth, after all? Is the pit deeper than the shallow mirror which reflects its lowest recesses?--Heinrich Heine.

We praise the dramatic poet who possesses the art of drawing tears--a talent which he has in common with the meanest onion!--Heinrich Heine.

I have observed a gardener cut the outward rind of a tree (which is the surtout of it), to make it bear well: and this is a natural account of the usual poverty of poets, and is an argument why wits, of all men living, ought to be ill clad. I have always a sacred veneration for any one I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher; because the richest minerals are ever found under the most ragged and withered surfaces of the earth.--Swift.

Words become luminous when the poet's finger has passed over them its phosphorescence.--Joubert.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.--Shelley.

Poets are far rarer births than kings.--Ben Jonson.

One might discover schools of the poets as distinctly as schools of the painters, by much converse in them, and a thorough taste of their manner of writing.--Pope.

They learn in suffering what they teach in song.--Shelley.

~Policy.~--He has mastered all points who has combined the useful with the agreeable.--Horace.

At court one becomes a sort of human ant-eater, and learns to catch one's prey by one's tongue.--Bulwer-Lytton.

Measures, not men, have always been my mark.--Goldsmith.

In a troubled state, we must do as in foul weather upon a river, not think to cut directly through, for the boat may be filled with water; but rise and fall as the waves do, and give way as much as we conveniently can.--Seldon.

To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.--George Eliot.

~Politeness.~--Politeness is fictitious benevolence. It supplies the place of it among those who see each other only in public, or but little. Depend upon it, the want of it never fails to produce something disagreeable to one or other. I have always applied to good breeding what Addison, in his "Cato," says of honor: "Honor's a sacred tie: the law of kings; the noble mind's distinguishing perfection; that aids and strengthens Virtue where it meets her, and imitates her actions where she is not."--Johnson.

Self-command is the main elegance.--Emerson.

Politeness smooths wrinkles.--Joubert.

Politeness is as natural to delicate natures as perfume is to flowers.--De Finod.

~Politics.~--It is the misfortune of all miscellaneous political combinations, that with the purest motives of their more generous members are ever mixed the most sordid interests and the fiercest passions of mean confederates.--Bulwer-Lytton.

Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong.--Daniel O'Connell.

Those who think must govern those who toil.--Goldsmith.