But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet. Lessen like sound of friends departing feet; And death is beautiful as feet of friend. Coming with welcome at our journey's end.

Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it, We are happy now because God so wills it; No matter how barren the past may have been, 'T is enough for us now that the leaves are green; We sit in the warm shade and feel right well How the sap creeps up and the blossoms swell... The breeze comes whispering in our ear, That dandelions are blossoming near... Every thing is upward striving; 'T is as easy now for the heart to be true As for grass to be green or skies to be blue, - 'T is the natural way of living.

It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.

The snow had begun in the gloaming, and busily all the night had been heaping field and highway with a silence deep and white.

In all literary history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential.

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.

Life is constantly weighing us in very sensitive scales, and telling every one of us precisely what his real weight is to the last grain of dust.