hese little sparks of holy fire which I have thus heaped up together
do not give life to your prepared and already enkindled spirit, yet they
will sometimes help to entertain a thought, to actuate a passion, to
employ and hallow a fancy.--_Jeremy Taylor._

If the grain were separated from the chaff which fills the works of our
National Poets, what is truly valuable would be to what is useless in
the proportion of a mole-hill to a mountain.--_Burke._

It is the beauty and independent worth of the citations, far more than
their appropriateness, which have made Johnson's Dictionary popular even
as a reading-book.--_Coleridge._

Ruin half an author's graces by plucking bon-mots from their
places.--_Hannah More._

I take memorandums of the schools.--_Swift._

The obscurest sayings of the truly great are often those which contain
the germ of the profoundest and most useful truths.--_Mazzini._

To select well among old things is almost equal to inventing new
ones.--_Trublet._

Why are not more gems from our great authors scattered over the country?
Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though it is better to
know them thoroughly than to know them only here and there, yet it is a
good work to give a little to those who have neither time nor means to
get more. Let every bookworm, when in any fragrant, scarce old tome he
discovers a sentence, a story, an illustration, that does his heart
good, hasten to give it.--_Coleridge._

A couplet of verse, a period of prose, may cling to the rock of ages as
a shell that survives a deluge.--_Bulwer-Lytton._

Selected thoughts depend for their flavor upon the terseness of their
expression, for thoughts are grains of sugar, or salt, that must be
melted in a drop of water.--_J. Petit Senn._

As people read nothing in these days that is more than forty-eight hours
old, I am daily admonished that allusions, the most obvious, to anything
in the rear of our own times need explanation.--_De Quincey._

R.

~Rain.~--Clouds dissolved the thirsty ground supply.--_Roscommon._

The kind refresher of the summer heats.--_Thomson._

Vexed sailors curse the rain for which poor shepherds prayed in
vain.--_Waller._

The spongy clouds are filled with gathering rain.--_Dryden._

~Rainbow.~--That smiling daughter of the storm.--_Colton._

Born of the shower, and colored by the sun.--_J. C. Prince._

God's glowing covenant.--_Hosea Ballou._

~Rank.~--If it were ever allowable to fo