True love ennobles and dignifies the material labors of life; and homely services rendered for love's sake have in them a poetry that is immortal.

God has always been to me not so much like a father as like a dear and tender mother.

Death! Strange that there should be such a word, and such a thing, and we ever forget it; that one should be living, warm and beautiful, full of hopes, desires and wants, one day, and the next be gone, utterly gone, and forever!

There are in this world two kinds of natures, - those that have wings, and those that have feet, - the winged and the walking spirits. The walking are the logicians; the winged are the instinctive and poetic.

the Lord gives good many things twice over; but he don't give ye a mother but once.

It is always our treasure that the lightning strikes.

After all, let a man take what pains he may to hush it down, a human soul is an awful, ghostly, unquiet possession for a bad man to have. Who knows the metes and bounds of it? Who knows all its awful perhapses,--those shudderings and tremblings, which it can no more live down than it can outlive its own eternity?