There seems no reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual impartiality should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered be a cause not partisan.

O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.

Nearly all literature, in one sense, is made up of guide-books. Old ones tell us the ways our fathers went, through the thoroughfares and courts of old; but how few of those former places can their posterity trace, amid avenues of modern erections; to how few is the old guide-book now a clew! Every age makes its own guide-books, and the old ones are used for waste paper.

A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

Time is made up of various ages; and each thinks its own a novelty.

The only ugliness is that of the heart, seen through the face. And though beauty be obvious, the only loveliness is invisible.

beauty is like piety--you cannot run and read it; tranquility and constancy, with, now-a-days, an easy chair, are needed.