The coarsest father gains a new impulse to labor from the moment of his baby's birth; he scarcely sees it when awake, and yet it is with him all the time. Every stroke he strikes is for his child. New social aims, new moral motives, come vaguely up to him.

How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no winter in our year!

As the spring comes on, and the densening outlines of the elm give daily a new design for a Grecian urn, — its hue, first brown with blossoms, then emerald with leaves, — we appreciate the vanishing beauty of the bare boughs. In our favored temperate zone, the trees denude themselves each year, like the goddesses before Paris, that we may see which unadorned loveliness is the fairest.

The test of an author is not to be found merely in the number of his phrases that pass current in the corner of newspapers... but in the number of passages that have really taken root in younger minds.

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

To be really cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his own country.

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