Politics of all sorts, I confess, are far beyond my limited powers of comprehension. Those of this country as far as I have been able to observe, resolve themselves into two great motives. The aristocratic desire of elevation and separation, and the democratic desire of demolishing and levelling.

Assuredly of all earthly conditions uncertainty is the most unblest.

The drama is the looking-glass in which we see the hideousness of vice and the beauties of virtue.

Carols of gladness ring from every tree.

...I cannot help being astonished at the furious and ungoverned execration which all reference to the possibility of a fusion of the races draws down upon those who suggest it, because nobody pretends to deny that, throughout the South, a large proportion of the population is the offspring of white men and colored women.

I want to do everything in the world that can be done.

When marriage is what it ought to be, it is indeed the very happiest condition of existence.