By cultivating an interest in a few good books which contain the result of the toil or the quintessence of the genius of some of the most gifted thinkers of the world, we need not live on the marsh and in the mists. The slopes and ridges invite us.

What a privilege it is to be an American!

The spirit of a person's life is ever shedding some power, just as a flower is steadily bestowing fragrance upon the air.

Nature never writes a blind hand.

Leaves are the Greek, flowers the Italian, phase of the spirit of beauty that reveals itself through the flora of the globe.

The oak roars when a high wind wrestles with it; the beech shrieks; the elm sends forth a long, deep groan; the ash pours out moans of thrilling anguish.

A visit to New Hampshire supplies the most resources to a traveler, and confers the most benefit on the mind and taste, when it lifts him above mere appetite for wildness, ruggedness, and the feeling of mass and precipitous elevation, into a perception and love of the refined grandeur, the chaste sublimity, the airy majesty overlaid with tender and polished bloom, in which the landscape splendor of a noble mountain lies.