The craft with which the world is made runs also into the mind and character of men. No man is quite sane; each has a vein of folly in his composition, a slight determination of blood to the head, to make sure of holding him hard to some one point which Nature has taken to heart.

Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on both sides,and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line.

Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician.

Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago, but it is put to better use.

Though we love goodness and not stealing, yet also we love freedom and not preaching.

The mystic must be steadily told,-All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,-universal signs, instead of these village symbols,-and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.

With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing.