Sublime

His reason no less than his imagination will tell him that the fight here waged between the family and the field is of all things the most primitive and fundamental. If that is not poetical, nothing is poetical,

In everybody there is a certain thing that loves babies, that fears death, that likes sunlight that thing enjoys Dickens.

But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

It is useless for us to attempt to imagine Dickens and his life unless we are able at least to imagine this old atmosphere of a democratic optimism—a confidence in common men.

It is the old things that startle and intoxicate.

that grand and very Christian quality of the man who laughs at himself.

His really sound and essential conception of Liberty, “Turning to scorn with lips divine The falsehood of extremes,” is as good a definition of Liberalism as has been uttered in poetry in the Liberal century.

It is not a question between mysticism and rationality. It is a question between mysticism and madness.

It is precisely those who have been conservative about the family who have been revolutionary about the state.