Canst thou prophesy, thou little tree, What the glory of thy boughs shall be?

It is one of the most beautiful facts in this human existence of ours, that we remember the earliest and freshest part of it most vividly. Doubtless it was meant that our childhood should live on in us forever.

If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it.

The religion of our fathers overhung us children like the shadow of a mighty tree against the trunk of which we rested, while we looked up in wonder through the great boughs that half hid and half revealed the sky. Some of the boughs were already decaying, so that perhaps we began to see a little more of the sky than our elders; but the tree was sound at its heart.

It is the greatest of all mistakes to begin life with the expectation that it is going to be easy, or with the wish to have it so.

The whole world of thought lay unexplored before me, - a world of which I had already caught large and tempting glimpses.

Girls especially are fond of exchanging confidences with those whom they think they can trust; it is one of the most charming traits of a simple, earnest-hearted girlhood, and they are the happiest women who never lose it entirely.