All birds during the pairing season become more or less sentimental, and murmur soft nothings in a tone very unlike the grinding-organ repetition and loudness of their habitual song. The crow is very comical as a lover; and to hear him trying to soften his croak to the proper Saint-Preux standard has something the effect of a Mississippi boatman quoting Tennyson.

It is not without reason that fame is awarded only after death. The cloud-dust of notoriety which follows and envelops the men who drive with the wind bewilders contemporary judgment.

My soul is not a palace of the past.

Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.

It may be conjectured that it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that the ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong is in their heads.

Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.

If the devil take a less hateful shape to us than to our fathers, he is as busy with us as with them.