Cease to brag to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions. America, too, will have to strain its energies, crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons, and mud-demons, before it can become a babitation for the gods.

Well might the ancients make silence a god; for it is the element of all godhood, infinitude, or transcendental greatness,--at once the source and the ocean wherein all such begins and ends.

Labor, wide as the earth, has its summit in heaven.

All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.

The leafy blossoming present time springs from the whole past, remembered and unrememberable.

The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the physician's aphorism, and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it.

Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business: and gives in the long run a net result of zero.