What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old sundials! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished? If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance.

A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market.

Fly not yet; 't is just the hour When pleasure, like the midnight flower That scorns the eye of vulgar light, Begins to bloom for sons of night And maids who love the moon.

Who has not felt how sadly sweet The dream of home, the dream of home, Steals o'er the heart, too soon to fleet, When far o'er sea or land we roam?

This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised.

The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is perhaps cowardice.

I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.