When thus the heart is in a vein Of tender thought, the simplest strain Can touch it with peculiar power.

Shakespeare is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book.

There is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours, but it was labor thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquets, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writers digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour.

In every thing that relates to science, I am a whole Encyclopaedia behind the rest of the world.

Science has succeeded to poetry, no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil?

Is the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or is there not in the bosom of the wisest and the best some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest enchantments?

Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.