To carry feelings of childhood into the powers of adulthood, to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for years has rendered familiar, this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish it from talent.
Christianity is within a man, even as he is gifted with reason; it is associated with your mother's chair, and with the first remembered, tones of her blessed voice.
Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.
Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth,
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny, and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.
For I often please myself with the fancy, now that I may have saved from oblivion the only striking passage in a whole volume, and now that I may have attracted notice to a writer undeservedly forgotten.
A maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is merely speculative; a "principle" carries knowledge within itself, and is prospective.
The form is mechanic when on any given material we impress a predetermined form. The organic form, on the other hand, is innate, it shapes as it develops itself from within.