Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

But the time will come when New England will be as thickly peopled as old England. Wages will be as low, and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams; and, in those Manchesters and Birminghams, hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test.

There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.