The departing woman left behind her a gift that had never been hers--the power of verse: he began to be a poet.

The older I grow the more am I filled with marvel at the divine idea of the mutual development of the man and the woman.

Many a woman has made of a man, for the time at least, and sometimes for ever, a poet, caring for his verses never a cambric handkerchief or pair of gloves! A wretched man to whom a poem is not worth a sneer, may set a woman singing to the centuries! Any gift of the nature of poetry, however poor or small, is of value inestimable to the development of the individual, ludicrous even though it may show itself, should conceit clothe it in print.
The desire of fame, so vaunted, is the ruin of the small, sometimes of the great poet.

The next evil to doing anything for love of money, is doing it for the love of fame.

A man may have a wife who is all the world to him, but must he therefore set her on a throne?
Cosmo, essentially and peculiarly practical, never thought of the world and his verses together, but gathered life for himself in the making of them.
These children of his, like all real children, strengthened his heart, and upheld his hands.