To sigh, yet feel no pain; To weep, yet scarce know why; To sport an hour with Beauty's chain, Then throw it idly by.

Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that perhaps — good works.

To be thankful for what we grasp exceeding our proportion is to add hypocrisy to injustice.

Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free, First flower of the earth and first gem of the sea.

Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faerie Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrews's Sermons?

Ay, down to the dust with them, slaves as they are! From this hour let the blood in their dastardly veins, That shrunk at the first touch of Liberty's war, Be wasted for tyrants, or stagnate in chains.

The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.