A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks where the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets.

It has been so written, for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them.

What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then!

Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons.

In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven.

I am a majority of one.