“Love is as necessary to me as to every other human being. I may imprison myself in solitude and devote every hour to calm cultivation yet without this the richest gains of mind will in the end seem as dust.”

Insisting that intellectual achievement cannot compensate for the absence of human affection · Letter to Laurence Binyon, March 1889

• Love
• Mind
• Solitude

“Often I go at day-break to stand and see the sun rise out of the mist and water, drinking the silence of the fresh air, the divine earliness of morning.”

Revealing the poet's contemplative delight in silence, landscape and the freshness of dawn · Letter to Laurence Binyon from Calcutta, c. 1897

• Nature
• Silence
• Wonder

“If you were to go to India and look with an unprejudiced eye, you would see that the system of Government is rotten to the core.”

A strikingly early expression of his opposition to injustice under British rule in India · Letter to Laurence Binyon, October 1887

• Justice
• Politics
• Truth