Inexpressibly beautiful appears the recognition by man of the least natural fact, and the allying his life to it.

And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass.

A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally, as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only. We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.

The wonderful purity of nature at this season is a most pleasing fact.... In the bare fields and tinkling woods, see what virtue survives. In the coldest and bleakest places, the warmest charities still maintain a foothold.

If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.

You may tell by looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very wood-pile, whether its winter is past or not.

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.