I very much wish that some day or other you may have time to learn Greek, because that language is an idea. Even a little of it is like manure to the soil of the mind, and makes it bear finer flowers.

I would have any one, who really and truly has leisure and ability, make verses. I think it a more refining and happy-making occupation than any other pastime accomplishment.

Chill December brings the sleet, Blazing fire, and Christmas treat.

The desire to be the object of public attention is weak, but the excessive dread of it is but a form of vanity and over-self-contemplativeness.

When I read or hear of the mutual injuries of England and Ireland, I fancy it would have been a blessed thing had the sea never flowed between the two countries. Had they been all in one, surely there would have been more unity between them of interests and of feelings. But let us hope that days of peace and general enlightenment will arrive by ways past man's finding out.

Puns are often unacceptable to the feelings; they come like a spoonful of ice-cream in the midst of a comfortable smoking-hot steak, or as a peppery morsel when your palate was in expectation of a mild pudding.

Parents and children cannot be to each other, as husbands with wives and wives with husbands. Nature has separated them by an almost impassable barrier of time; the mind and the heart are in quite a different state at fifteen and forty.