Happiness puts on as many shapes as discontent, and there is nothing odder than the satisfaction of one's neighbor.

Sin has always been an ugly word, but it has been made so in a new sense over the last half-century. It has been made not only ugly but pass?. People are no longer sinful, they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened or, more particularly, sick.

Shunning the upstart shower, / The cold and cursory scrub, / I celebrate the power / That lies within the Tub.

Mere wealth, I am above it, / It is the reputation wide, / The playwright's pomp, the poet's pride / That eagerly I covet.

A bit of trash now and then is good for the severest reader. It provides the necessary roughage in the literary diet.

Kindness is a virtue neither modern nor urban. One almost unlearns it in a city. Towns have their own beatitude; they are not unfriendly; they offer a vast and solacing anonymity or an equally vast and solacing gregariousness. But one needs a neighbor on whom to practice compassion.

God know that a mother need fortitude and courage and tolerance and flexibility and patience and firmness and nearly every other brave aspect of the human soul.