It is in rugged crises, in unbearable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of the question, that the angel is shown.

My life is not an apology, but a life.

In sculpture did ever anybody call the Apollo a fancy piece? Or say of the Laocoon how it might be made different? A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.

The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,--faint copies of an invisible archetype.

If the race is good, so is the place.

Style is only the frame to hold your thoughts. It is like the sash of a window; if heavy, it will obscure the light.

A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.