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

The first wild-flower of the year is like land after sea.

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

Travelers find virtue in a seeming minority in all other countries, and forget that they have left it in a minority at home.

After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.

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

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.