But whom to love?
Whom you’d be trusting?
Who’s that, which never us betrays?
Who’s helpfully for us adjusting His own deeds and when he prays,
Who helps from slander not to perish?
Who carefully us can cherish?
To whom my vice is not a harm?
Who never bores us by his charm?
By those phantoms he, vain seeker, Should not in vain exhaust himself:
You first of alt must love yourself, My dear venerable reader!
Such subject’s worthy of your mind: More gentle never you will find.

There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence.
No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume; there was a real joy in that—perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims....