st a number
of other plants of similar height one that was dark in color, with
tightly closed leaves and a stalk that was very straight and stiff.
When I touched it, it said to me in firm tones: _Let me alone; I am
not for your collection, like these plants to which Nature has given
only a single year of life. I am a little oak_.

So it is with a man whose influence is to last for hundreds of years.
As a child, as a youth, often even as a full-grown man, nay, his whole
life long, he goes about among his fellows, looking like them and
seemingly as unimportant. But let him alone; he will not die. Time
will come and bring those who know how to value him.

* * * * *

The man who goes up in a balloon does not feel as though he were
ascending; he only sees the earth sinking deeper under him.

There is a mystery which only those will understand who feel the truth
of it.

* * * * *

Your estimation of a man's size will be affected by the distance at
which you stand from him, but in two entirely opposite ways according
as it is his physical or his mental stature that you are considering.
The one will seem smaller, the farther off you move; the other,
greater.

* * * * *

Nature covers all her works with a varnish of beauty, like the tender
bloom that is breathed, as it were, on the surface of a peach or a
plum. Painters and poets lay themselves out to take off this varnish,
to store it up, and give it us to be enjoyed at our leisure. We drink
deep of this beauty long before we enter upon life itself; and when
afterwards we come to see the works of Nature for ourselves, the
varnish is gone: the artists have used it up and we have enjoyed it in
advance. Thus it is that the world so often appears harsh and devoid
of charm, nay, actually repulsive. It were better to leave us to
discover the varnish for ourselves. This would mean that we should
not enjoy it all at once and in large quantities; we should have no
finished pictures, no perfect poems; but we should look at all things
in that genial and pleasing light in which even now a child of Nature
sometimes sees them--some one who has not anticipated his aesthetic
pleasures by the help of art, or taken the charms of life too early.

* * * * *

The Cathedral in Mayence is so shut in by the houses that are built
round about it, that there is no one s