Reading Chaucer is like brushing through the dewy grass at sunrise.

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.

God does not weigh criminality in our scales. We have one absolute, with the seal of authority upon it; and with us an ounce is an ounce, and a pound a pound. God's measure is the heart of the offender,--a balance which varies with every one of us, a balance so delicate that a tear cast in the other side may make the weight of error kick the beam.

To me it seems not unreasonable to find a re-enforcement of optimism, a renewal of courage and hope, in the modern theory that man has mounted to what he is from the lowest step of potentiality, through toilsome grades of ever-expanding existence, even thought it have been by a spiral stairway, mainly dark or dusty, with loop-holes at long intervals only, and these granting but a narrow and one-sided view.

Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly related than is commonly supposed.

No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him. There is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessed are the horny hands of toil.