l positive qualities, even those which are disreputable,
in the capacious theatre of their dispositions. Such can live many
lives; while a Thoreau can live but one, and that only with perpetual
foresight.

*****

We can all be angry with our neighbour; what we want is to be shown, not
his defects, of which we are too conscious, but his merits, to which we
are too blind.

*****

And methought that beauty and terror are only one, not two;
And the world has room for love, and death, and thunder, and dew;
And all the sinews of hell slumber in summer air;
And the face of God is a rock, but the face of the rock is fair.
Beneficent streams of tears flow at the finger of pain;
And out of the cloud that smites, beneficent rivers of rain.

*****

'The longest and most abstruse flight of a philosopher becomes clear and
shallow, in the flash of a moment, when we suddenly perceive the
aspect and drift of his intention. The longest argument is but a finger
pointed; once we get our own finger rightly parallel, and we see what
the man meant, whether it be a new Star or an old street-lamp. And
briefly, if a saying is hard to understand, it is because we are
thinking of something else.

*****

I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe
they both get paid in the end, but the fools first.

*****

Whether people's gratitude for the good gifts that come to them be
wisely conceived or dutifully expressed is a secondary matter, after
all, so long as they feel gratitude. The true ignorance is when a man
does not know that he has received a good gift, or begins to imagine
that he has got it for himself. The self-made man is the funniest
windbag after all! There is a marked difference between decreeing light
in chaos, and lighting the gas in a metropolitan back parlour with a box
of patent matches; and, do what we will, there is always something made
to our hand, if it were only our fingers.

*****

Benjamin Franklin went through life an altered man, because he once paid
too dearly for a penny whistle. My concern springs usually from a deeper
source, to wit, from having bought a whistle when I did not want one.

*****

I believe in a better state of things, that there will be no more
nurses, and that every mother will nurse her own offspring; for what
can be more hardening and demoralising than to call forth the tenderest
feelings of a woman's heart and cherish them yourself as lon