Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see - not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.

The farmer after sacrificing pleasure, taste, freedom, thought, love, to his work, turns out often a bankrupt, like the merchant.This result might well seem astounding. All this drudgery, from cockcrowing to starlight, for all these years, to end in mortgages and the auctioneer's flag, and removing from bad to worse. It is time to have the thing looked into, and with a sifting criticism ascertained who is the fool.

It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt to themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form.

A home kept to the end of display is impossible to all but a few women, and their success is dearly bought.

For every seeing soul, there are two absorbing facts - I, and the abyss.

Dreams and beasts are two keys by which we find out the keys of our own nature.

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem.