The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.

In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them; then pray that your grieves may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain.

In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!

No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

Moonlight is sculpture.

Technologies of easy travel "give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,-in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?