When we attempt to define and describe God, both language and thought desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and savages.

We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent wasa youthful effervescence which we have now lost.

Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and dust-hole of thought is presided over by a certain reason, too.

All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature.

But, if we explore the literature of Heroism, we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the Epaminodas, the Scipio of old, and I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all the ancient writers. Each of his "Lives" is a refutation to the despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists. A wild courage, a Stoicism not of the schools, but of the blood, shines in every anecdote, and had given that book immense fame.

There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; alwayswe are invited to work.

Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times.