Alas! we know that ideals can never be completely embodied in practice. Ideals must ever lie a great way off--and we will thankfully content ourselves with any not intolerable approximation thereto! Let no man, as Schiller says, too querulously "measure by a scale of perfection the meager product of reality" in this poor world of ours.

Venerable to me is the hard hand,--crooked, coarse,--wherein, notwithstanding, lies a cunning virtue, indispensably royal as of the sceptre of the planet.

How indestructibly the good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of evil.

Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it there, and even spurn it back when it wishes to get farther.

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.

He that can work is born to be king of something.

Reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than fiction.