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Famous swords are made of refuse scraps, thought worthless.
Poetry is the only verity--the expression of a sound mind speaking
after the ideal--and not after the apparent.--_Emerson_.
The form of oath among the Shoshone Indians is, "The earth hears me.
The sun hears me. Shall I lie?"
The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of
cities, nor the crops--no, but the kind of a man the country turns
out.--_Emerson_.
The whole wide ether is the eagle's sway:
The whole earth is a brave man's fatherland.--_Euripides_.
Spices crush'd, their pungence yield,
Trodden scents their sweets respire;
Would you have its strength reveal'd?
Cast the incense in the fire.
Matthew Arnold speaks of "the huge Mississippi of falsehood called
History."
The wind blows north, the wind blows south,
The wind blows east and west;
No matter how the free wind blows,
Some ship will find it best.
Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you, and
be silent.--_Epictetus_.
Victor Hugo makes a donkey meditate and apostrophize thus:
My brother, man, if you would know the truth,
We both are by the same dull walls shut in;
The gate is massive and the dungeon strong.
But you look through the key-hole out beyond,
And call this knowledge; yet have not at hand
The key wherein to turn the fatal lock.
"William Cullen Bryant surprised me once," relates a writer in a
New York paper, "by saying that prose was the natural language of
composition, and he wonder'd how anybody came to write poetry.
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