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.

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.

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

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.

Character shows itself apart from genius as a special thing. The first point of measurement of any man is that of quality.

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

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.