Who can wonder at the attractiveness... of the bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator?

The ideas of things intellectually known pass into the substance of the intellect much more than do foods into the substance of the body.

There is a moment in the history of every nation, when . . . the perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant . . . with his feet still planted on the immense forces of night, converses by his eyes and brain with solar and stellar creation.

The fate of the poor shepherd, who, blinded and lost in the snow-storm, perishes in a drift within a few feet of his cottage door, is an emblem of the state of man.

Poetry being an attempt to express, not the common sense, - as the avoirdupois of the hero, or his structure in feet and inches, - but the beauty and soul in his aspect . . . runs into fable, personifies every fact. . . .

The soul exists partly in eternity and partly in time.

Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature.