Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.

After a debauch of thunder-shower, the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow.

I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.

Come watch with me the shaft of fire that glows in yonder West; the fair, frail palaces, The fading Alps and archipelagoes and great cloud continents of sunset-seas.

When friends are at your hearthside met, Sweet courtesy has done its most If you have made each guest forget That he himself is not the host.

Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct shadows to the generations following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.