Nature repairs her ravages,--repairs them with her sunshine and with human labor.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

We must not inquire too curiously into motives. they are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.

The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.

... the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection.

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.