The moment our discourse rises above the ground-line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought.... This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation.

He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted.

The love that you withhold is the pain that you carry.

The energetic action of the times develops individualism, and the religious appear isolated. I esteem this a step in the right direction. Heaven deals with us on no representative system. Souls are not saved in bundles.

Society is frivolous, and shreds its day into scraps, its conversation into ceremonies and escapes.

You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin class, but much of histuition comes, on his way to school, from the shop- windows.

But I shall hear without pain, that I play the courtier very ill, and talk of that which I do not well understand.