It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of national literature on each other, to see the humor of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind.

Hush! Still as death, The tempest holds his breath As from a sudden will; The rain stops short, but from the eaves You see it drop, and hear it from the leaves, All is so bodingly still.

It is singular how impatient men are with overpraise of others, how patient of overpraise of themselves; and yet the one does them no injury, while the other may be their ruin.

Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave.

It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.

And the poorest twig on the elm-tree was ridged inch deep with pearl.

Every person born into this world their work is born with them.