If a man can have only one kind of sense, let him have common sense. If he has that and uncommon sense too, he is not far from genius.

The beginning is the promise of the end.

Boys have their soft and gentle moods too. You would suppose by the morning racket that nothing could be more foreign to their nature than romance and vague sadness. . . . But boys have hours of great sinking and sadness, when kindness and fondness are peculiarly needful to them.

But there have been human hearts, constituted just like ours, for six thousand years. The same stars rise and set upon this globe that rose upon the plains of Shinar or along the Egyptian Nile and the same sorrows rise and set in every age.

The one great poem of New England is her Sunday.

Nothing marks the change from the city to the country so much as the absence of grinding noises. The country is never silent. But its sounds are separate, distinct, and as it were, articulate.

That is true culture which helps us to work for the social betterment of all.