A nation may be ever so civilized and yet lack wisdom.

I have myself to respect, but to myself I am not amiable; but my friend is my amiableness personified.

It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.

Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.

We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.

What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties!

Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.