“Much as we all love and admire your work, it seems to me we have not yet fully realized the unostentatious loveliness of your lyrics, as fine for lyrics as your best sonnets are for sonnets.”

Praising lyric poetry whose artistry works without display or self-consciousness · Letter to Louise Chandler Moulton, quoted in Representative Women of New England

• Beauty
• Poetry
• Style

“If I only could sleep!”

A stark recurring expression of exhaustion during the final illness of his life · Late letters quoted by Louise Chandler Moulton in her biographical sketch

• Rest
• Sadness
• Suffering

“I could see the tree-boughs waving in the wind, and I could see the pageant of sunset in the west, and the glimmer of a fire upon the hearth.”

Recalling the fragments of visual beauty that remained to him before complete blindness · Reminiscence recorded by William Sharp, Papers Critical and Reminiscent

• Beauty
• Memory
• Nature