But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.

Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.

Even Nature is observed to have her playful moods or aspects, of which man sometimes seems to be the sport.

Letter-writing too often degenerates into a communicating of facts, and not of truths; of other men's deeds and not our thoughts.What are the convulsions of a planet, compared with the emotions of the soul? or the rising of a thousand suns, if that is not enlightened by a ray?

There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived.

But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost.

It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus. As when astronomers call the lately discovered planet Neptune; or the asteroid Astr