Spring and autumn are inconsiderable events in a landscape compared with the shadows of a cloud.

The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood.

If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical.

We talk of sunshine and moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is yet one of the illuminations of our skies. A shining cloud is one of the most majestic of all secondary lights.

Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn, / Unseen, this colorless sky of folded showers, / And folded winds...

Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as children are they would yet find so many things at table to be detestable.

Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind.