When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hang it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune.

Are you not scared by seeing that the gypsies are more attractive to us than the apostles?

Great men do not content us. It is their solitude, not their force, that makes them conspicuous.

Every man is not so much a workman in the world as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age.

All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.

People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name of hero or saint.

Happy the man who never puts on a face, but receives every visitor with that countenance he has on.