If we with earnest effort could succeed To make our life one long, connected prayer, As lives of some, perhaps, have been and are; If, never leaving Thee, we have no need Our wandering spirits back again to lead Into Thy presence, but continued there Like angels standing on the highest stair Of the Sapphire Throne: this were to pray indeed!

Language is the close-fitting dress of thought.

There is hardly a mistake which in the course of our lives we have committed, but some proverb, had we known and attended to its lesson, might have saved us from it.

Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.

The love of our own language, what is it, in fact, but the love of our country expressing itself in one particular direction?

The present is only intelligible in the light of the past.

"The best is oftentimes the enemy of the good;" and without claiming for an instant that title of good for my book, I do not doubt that many a good book has remained unwritten, or, perhaps, being written, has remained unpublished, because there floated before the mind's eye of the author, or possible author, the ideal of a better or a best, which has put him out of all conceit with his good.