O scaly, slippery, wet, swift, staring wights, What is 't ye do? what life lead? eh, dull goggles? How do ye vary your vile days and nights? How pass your Sundays? Are ye still but joggles In ceaseless wash? Still nought but gapes and bites, And drinks, and stares, diversified with boggles.

Great women belong to history and to self-sacrifice, not to the annals of a stage, however dignified.

Music is the medicine of the breaking heart.

The same people who can deny others everything are famous for refusing themselves nothing.

It is a delicious moment, certainly, that of being well nestled in bed, and feeling that you shall drop gently to sleep. The good is to come, not past; the limbs have just been tired enough to render the remaining in one posture delightful; the labour of the day is gone.

Beauty too often sacrifices to fashion. The spirit of fashion is not the beautiful, but the wilful; not the graceful, but the fantastic; not the superior in the abstract, but the superior in the worst of all concretes,-the vulgar.

We lose in depth of expression when we go to inferior animals for comparisons with human beauty. Homer calls Juno ox-eyed; and the epithet suits well with the eyes of that goddess, because she may be supposed, with all her beauty, to want a certain humanity. Her large eyes look at you with a royal indifference.

Hair is the most delicate and lasting of our materials, and survives us, like love. It is so light, so gentle; so escaping from the idea of death, that, with a lock of hair belonging to a child or friend, we may almost look up to heaven and compare notes with the angelic nature, -- may almost say, I have a piece of thee here not unworthy of thy being now.

Jenny kissed me when we met, Jumping from the chair she sat in; Time, you thief, who love to get Sweets into your list, put that in: Say I'm weary, say I'm sad, Say that health and wealth have missed me, Say I'm growing old, but add -- Jenny kissed me!

The person who can be only serious or only cheerful, is but half a man.

Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair.

Anglers boast of the innocence of their pastime; yet it puts fellow-creatures to the torture. They pique themselves on their meditative faculties; and yet their only excuse is a want of thought.

We are violets blue, For our sweetness found Careless in the mossy shades, Looking on the ground. Love's dropp'd eyelids and a kiss, -- Such our breath and blueness is.

Wit is the clash and reconcilement of incongruities, the meeting of extremes round a corner.

The two divinest things this world has got,A lovely woman in a rural spot!

Mere grimness is as easy as grinning; but it requires something to put a handsome face on a story. Narratives become of suspicious merit in proportion as they lean to Newgate-like offenses, particularly of blood and wounds.

The more sensible a woman is, supposing her not to be masculine, the more attractive she is in her proportionate power to entertain.

The last excessive feelings of delight are always grave.

The perfection of conversational intercourse is when the breeding of high life is animated by the fervor of genius.

Traveling in the company of those we love is home in motion.