Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances that provoke it, however trivial or mean, are no measure of its power. In the present instance the stage is a scrubbed gun deck, and one of the external provocations a man-of-war's-man's spilled soup.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.

There is a savor of life and immortality in substantial fare. Like balloons, we are nothing till filled.

Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.

Bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any twinges of their consciences touching desertion of the fire-side.

The worst of our evils we blindly inflict upon ourselves; our officers cannot remove them, even if they would.