Thackeray and Balzac will make it possible for our descendants to live over again the England and France of to-day. Seen in this light, the novelist has a higher office than merely and amuse his contemporaries.

You may have a cat in the room with you without anxiety about anything except eatables. The presence of a cat is positively soothing to a student.

People have prejudices against a nation in which they have no acquaintances.

High culture always isolates, always drives men out of their class, and makes it more difficult for them to share naturally and easily the common class-life around them. They seek the few companions who can understand them, and when these are not to be had within a traversable distance, they sit and work alone.

Woe unto him that is never alone, and cannot bear to be alone.

As there is no pleasure in military life for a soldier who fears death, so there is no independence in civil existence for the man who has an overpowering dread of solitude.

I wonder how it is that so cheerful-looking a tree as the willow should ever have become associated with ideas of sadness.