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

I have been out again on the river, rowing. I find nothing new.

Place, time, life, death, earth, heaven are divisions and distinctions we make, like the imaginary lines we trace upon the surface of the globe.

Those that we love never alter, unless we cease to love them.

children are made of eyes and ears, and nothing, however minute, escapes their microscopic observation.

American gentlemen are a cross between English and French men, and yet really altogether like neither. They are more refined and modest than Frenchmen, and less manly, shy, and rough, than Englishmen. Their brains are finer and flimsier, their bodies less robust and vigorous than ours. We are the finer animals, and they the subtler spirits. Their intellectual tendency is to excitement and insanity, and ours to stagnation and stupidity.

[On John Brown:] The poor wretch is hanged, but from his grave a root of bitterness will spring, the fruit of which at no distant day may be disunion and civil war.