Even the facts of science may dust the mind by their dryness, unless they are ... rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.

Justice is sweet and musical; but injustice is harsh and discordant.

We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has yet been sung. The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.

We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.

They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others.Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.

My themes will not be far-fetched. I will tell of homely every-day phenomena and adventures.