Poetic Promise by Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Read

In the present age it is next to impossible to predict from specimens, / however favourable, that a young man will turn out a great poet, or rather / a poet at all. Poetic taste, dexterity in composition, and ingenious / imitation, often produce poems that are very promising in appearance. But / genius, or the power of doing something new, is another thing. Mr. / Tennyson's sonnets, such as I have seen, have many of the characteristic / excellencies of those of Wordsworth and Southey.

It is a small thing that the patient knows of his own state; yet some / things he _does_ know better than his physician.

I never had, and never could feel, any horror at death, simply as death.

Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.