My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine.

The compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.

There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.

The world we live in is but thickened light.

Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State.

So . . . I feel in regard to this aged England . . . pressed upon by transitions of trade and . . . competing populations,-I see her not dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has seen dark days before;-indeed, with a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that, in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor and a pulse like a cannon.

The frost which kills the harvest of a year saves the harvest of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust.