The pleased sea on a white-breasted shore -- A shore that wears on her alluring brows Rare shells, far brought, the love-gifts of the sea, That blushed a tell-tale.

Each time we love,We turn a nearer and a broader markTo that keen archer, Sorrow, and he strikes.

My heart like moon-charmed waters, all unrest.

To bring the best human qualities to anything like perfection, to fill them with the sweet juices of courtesy and charity, prosperity, or, at all events, a moderate amount of it, is required, -- just as sunshine is needed for the ripening of peaches and apricots.

In winter, when the dismal rain

Comes down in slanting lines,

And Wind, that grand old harper, smote

His thunder-harp of pines.

The saddest thing that befalls a soul Is when it loses faith in God and woman.

It is not so much consequence what you say, as how you say it. Memorable sentences are memorable, on account of some single irradiating word.

A brave soul is a thing which all things serve.

Stirling, like a huge brooch, clasps Highlands and Lowlands together.

Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural.

Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of human life.

I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and to the laugh of Eve. I see the pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander.

A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.

To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.

The sea complains upon a thousand shores.

If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death.

To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for.

And in any case, to the old man, when the world becomes trite, the triteness arises not so much from a cessation as from a transference of interest. What is taken from this world is given to the next. The glory is in the east in the morning, it is in the west in the afternoon, and when it is dark the splendour is irradiating the realm of the under-world. He would only follow.

In the entire circle of the year there are no days so delightful as those of a fine October.