We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.

When we consider the weak and nerveless periods of some literary men, who perchance in feet and inches come up to the standard oftheir race, and are not deficient in girth also, we are amazed at the immense sacrifice of thews and sinews. What! these proportions, these bones,--and this their work! Hands which could have felled an ox have hewed this fragile matter which would not have tasked a lady's fingers! Can this be a stalwart man's work, who has a marrow in his back and a tendon Achilles in his heel?

Must be out-of-doors enough to get experience of wholesome reality, as a ballast to thought and sentiment. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wildness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wild man in her, became extinct.

The fire is the main comfort of the camp, whether in summer or winter

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.