To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.

In the mouths of many men soft words are like roses that soldiers put into the muzzles of their muskets on holidays.

How beautiful the silent hour, when morning and evening thus sit together, hand in hand, beneath the starless sky of midnight!

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

The surest pledge of a deathless name Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken.

The morrow was a bright September morn; The earth was beautiful as if newborn; There was nameless splendor everywhere, That wild exhilaration in the air, Which makes the passers in the city street Congratulate each other as they meet.

I venerate old age; and I love not the man who can look without emotion upon the sunset of life, when the dusk of evening begins to gather over the watery eye, and the shadows of twilight grow broader and deeper upon the understanding.