Fame itself is but an epitaph; as late, as false, as true.

I am engaged to Concord and my own private pursuits by 10,000 ties, and it would be suicide to rend them.

The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever!

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

Translate a book a dozen times from one language to another, and what becomes of its style? Most books would be worn out and disappear in this ordeal. The pen which wrote it is soon destroyed, but the poem survives.

They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent,--others merely sensible, as the phrase is,--others prophetic.