Some gifted adventurer is always sailing round the world of art and science, to bring home costly merchandise from every port.

It is the empiric who never fails.

The ponderous tomes are bales of the mind's merchandise.

From numberless books the fluttering reader, idle and inconstant, bears away the bloom that only clings to the outer leaf; but genius has its nectaries, delicate glands, and secrecies of sweetness, and upon these the thoughtful mind must settle in its labor, before the choice perfume of fancy and wisdom is drawn forth.

Taste is not stationary. It grows every day, and is improved by cultivation, as a good temper is refined by religion. In its most advanced state it takes the title of judgment. Hume quotes Fontenelle's ingenious distinction between the common watch that tells the hours, and the delicately constructed one that marks the seconds and smallest differences of time.

A first book has some of the sweetness of a first love.

Some imitation is involuntary and unconscious.