A weed is no more than a flower in disguise, Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.

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

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.

Large charity doth never soil, but only whitens soft white hands.

Better one bite at forty, of truths bitter rind, than the hot wine that gushed from the vintage of twenty.

I would hardly change the sorrowful words of the poets for their glad ones. Tears dampen the strings of the lyre, but they grow the tensor for it, and ring even the clearer and more ravishingly.

Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.