The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect.

Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy.

A good indignation makes an excellent speech.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds.

One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace; he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe.

We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.