The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more?

Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read nature. Aeschylus and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses.

The difference between those whom the world esteems as good and those whom it condemns as bad, is in many cases little else than that the former have been better sheltered from temptation.

The thoughtful excitement of lonely rambles, of gardening, and of other like occupations, where the mind has leisure to must during the healthful activity of the body, with the fresh and wakeful breezes blowing round it.

Many actions, like the Rhone, have two sources,--one pure, the other impure.

We look to our last sickness for repentance, unmindful that it is during a recovery men repent, not during a sickness.

I could hardly feel much confidence in a man who had never been imposed upon.