It makes no odds where a man goes or stays, if he is only about his business.

Though the hen should sit all day, she could lay only one egg, and, besides, would not have picked up materials for another.

We soon get through with Nature. She excites an expectation which she cannot satisfy. The merest child which has rambled into a copsewood dreams of a wildness so wild and strange and inexhaustible as Nature can never show him.

Enemies publish themselves. They declare war. The friend never declares his love.

Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of human art to its remotest shore. There is no telling what it may not vomit up.

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.