Talents, to strike the eye of posterity, should be concentrated. Rays, powerless while they are scattered, burn in a point.

In literature and art memory is a synonym for invention. It is the life-blood of imagination, which faints and dies when the veins are empty.

The advice of a scholar, whose piles of learning were set on fire by imagination, is never to be forgotten. Proportion an hour's reflection to an hour's reading, and so dispirit the book into the student.

Of many large volumes the index is the best portion and the usefullest. A glance through the casement gives whatever knowledge of the interior is needful. An epitome is only a book shortened; and as a general rule, the worth increases as the size lessens.

Some imitation is involuntary and unconscious.

Poetry deserves the honor it obtains as the eldest offspring of literature, and the fairest. It is the fruitfulness of many plants growing into one flower and sowing itself over the world in shapes of beauty and color, which differ with the soil that receives and the sun that ripens the seed. In Persia, it comes up the rose of Hafiz; in England, the many-blossomed tree of Shakespeare.

Every fresh acquirement is another remedy against affliction and time.