Life is an incurable disease.
Build yourself a book-nest to forget the world without.
Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape Who dost in every country change thy shape!
There have been fewer friends on earth than kings.
It is a hard and nice subject for a man to speak of himself: it grates his own heart to say anything of disparagement, and the reader's ear to hear anything of praise from him.
Does not the passage of Moses and the Israelites into the Holy Land yield incomparably more poetic variety than the voyages of Ulysses or Aeneas?