When one is five-and-twenty, one has not chalk-stones at one's finger-ends that the touch of a handsome girl should be entirely indifferent.

I think I am quite wicked with roses. I like to gather them, and smell them till they have no scent left.

A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.

The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.

In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.

A child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts." —WORDSWORTH.