How delightful is the company of generous people, who overlook trifles and keep their minds instinctively fixed on whatever is good and positive in the world around them.

Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.

Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is more, they find it everywhere.

Longfellow is to poetry what the barrel-organ is to music.

People of small calibre are always carping. How affected so-and-so is! Don't you think he is silly? He was certainly quite mistaken about this or that. They are bent on showing their own superiority, their knowledge or their prowess or good breeding.

The writer is important only by dint of the territory he colonizes.

Those of our writers who have possessed a vivid personal talent have been paralyzed by a want of social background.