"It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or e…"

"In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me."

"It is an evil growing out of our republican institutions, that here a man of large purse has usually a very little soul which he keeps in it."

"The true genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind."

"Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality."