What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

When a workman knows the use of his tools, he can make a door as well as a window.

In the ages since Adam's marriage, it has been good for some men to be alone, and for some women also.

There is no feeling, perhaps, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music,--that does not make a man sing or play the better.

For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal-this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life.