. . . if [writing] lift you from your feet with the great voice of eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent, over the minds of men; . . .

[The imagination] . . . inspires an audacious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of gunpowder, and . . . a word dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the Pit.

. . . if [writing] lift you from your feet with the great voice of eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent, over the minds of men; . . .

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.

[Nature said] The sea shall disjoin the people [of England] from others, and knit them to a fierce nationality. It shall give them markets on every side. Long time I will keep them on their feet, by poverty, border-wars . . . seafaring . . .

The doctors of antiquity have affirmed that love is a passion that resembles a melancholy disease. The physician Rasis prescribed, therefore, in order to recover, coitus, fasting, drunkenness, and walking.

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.