The sugar maple is remarkable for its clean ankle. The groves of these trees looked like vast forest sheds, their branches stopping short at a uniform height, four or five feet from the ground, like eaves, as if they had been trimmed by art, so that you could look under and through the whole grove with its leafy canopy, as under a tent whose curtain is raised.

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

Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concretic layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society...may unexpectedly come forth...to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!...Such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn...Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, ina government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.

All misfortune is but a stepping stone to fortune.

When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly, I think any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

For eighteen hundred years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds on the science of legislation?