Oh, ever thus, from childhood's hour, I 've seen my fondest hopes decay; I never loved a tree or flower But 't was the first to fade away. I never nurs'd a dear gazelle, To glad me with its soft black eye, But when it came to know me well And love me, it was sure to die.

Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

The going away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them as there was a common link. A. B. and C. make a party. A. dies. B. not only loses A. but all A.'s part in C. C. loses A.'s part in B., and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables.

I have sat through an Italian opera, til, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded street, to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention!

Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears.

Fly not yet; 't is just the hour When pleasure, like the midnight flower That scorns the eye of vulgar light, Begins to bloom for sons of night And maids who love the moon.

It is well if the good man himself does not feel his devotions a little clouded, those foggy sensuous steams mingling with and polluting the pure altar surface.

A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game.

Here cometh April again, and as far as I can see the world hath more fools in it than ever.

A man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings.

My only books Were woman's looks,- And folly 's all they 've taught me.

The truant Fancy was a wanderer ever.

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever puts one down without the feeling of disappointment.

In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces.

The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend.

There is a pleasure in affecting affectation.

It is with some violation of the imagination that we conceive of an actor belonging to the relations of private life, so closely do we identify these persons in our mind with the characters which they assume upon the stage.

Cards are war, in disguise of a sport.

Ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater.

This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised.