It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.

If I were to choose among all gifts and qualities that which, on the whole, makes life pleasantest, I should select the love of children. No circumstance can render this world wholly a solitude to one who has this possession

Only yonder magnificent pine-tree... holds her unchanging beauty throughout the year, like her half-brother, the ocean, whose voice she shares; and only marks the flowing of her annual tide of life by the new verdure that yearly submerges all trace of last year's ebb.

What instruction the baby brings to the mother!

What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, fixed in permanent outline forever?

Great men are rarely isolated mountain-peaks; they are the summits of ranges.

Nothing can hide from me the conviction that an immortal soul needs for its sustenance something more than visiting, and gardening, and novel-reading, and crochet-needle, and the occasional manufacture of sponge cake.