The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.

Men commonly couple with their idea of marriage a slight degree at least of sensuality; but every lover, the world over, believesin its inconceivable purity.

Fishing has been styled 'a contemplative man's recreation,' ... and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation.

Only lovers know the value and magnanimity of truth.

To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense,it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it.

Ex oriente lux may still be the motto of scholars, for the Western world has not yet derived from the East all the light which itis destined to receive thence.