"I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds."

“That is the great end of empires before God, to be Catholic and draw nations into their Catholicism. But our empire is less and less Christian as it grows.”

“All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose.”

“I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession.”

“Searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being.”

“I think that the trivialness of life is, and personally to each one, ought to be seen to be, done away with by the Incarnation.”

“It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.”