If it is surely the means to the highest end we know, can any work be humble or disgusting? Will it not rather be elevating as a ladder, the means by which we are translated?

This is a common experience in my traveling. I plod along, thinking what a miserable world this is and what miserable fellows we that inhabit it, wondering what it is tempts men to live in it; but anon I leave the towns behind and am lost in some boundless heath, and life becomes gradually more tolerable, if not even glorious.

Nature is full of genius, full of divinity.

It is only necessary that man should start a fence that Nature should carry it on and complete it. The farmer cannot plow quite up to the rails or wall which he himself has placed, and hence it often becomes a hedgerow and sometimes a coppice.

In Canada an ordinary New England house would be mistaken for the château, and while every village here contains at least severalgentlemen or "squires," there is but one to a seigniory.

Always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary.

I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.