The perfect resemblance of the chestnut, beech, and hornbeam in Europe and the United States rendered a separate figure unnecessary.
He says the white oak “is the only oak on which a few of the dried leaves persist till the circulation is renewed in the spring.”
Had often heard his father say that “the fruit of the common European walnut, in its natural state, is harder than that of the American species just mentioned [the pacane-nut hickory][117] and inferior to it in size and quality.”
The arts teach us a thousand lessons. Not a yard of cloth can be woven without the most thorough fidelity in the weaver. The ship must be made absolutely tight before it is launched.
It is an important difference between two characters that the one is satisfied with a happy but level success but the other as constantly elevates his aim. Though my life is low, if my spirit looks upward habitually at an elevated angle, it is as it were redeemed. When the desire to be better than we are is really sincere we are instantly elevated, and so far better already.
I lose my friends, of course, as much by my own ill treatment and ill valuing of them, prophaning of them, cheapening of them, as by their cheapening of themselves, till at last, when I am prepared to [do] them justice, I am permitted to deal only with the memories of themselves, their ideals still surviving in me, no longer with their actual selves. We exclude ourselves, as the child said of the stream in which he bathed head or foot. (Vide Confucius.)
It is something to know when you are addressed by Divinity and not by a common traveller. I went down cellar just now to get an armful of wood and, passing the brick piers with my wood and candle, I heard, methought, a commonplace suggestion, but when, as it were by accident, I reverently attended to the hint, I found that it was the voice of a god who had followed me down cellar to speak to me. How many communications may we not lose through inattention!
I would fain keep a journal which should contain those thoughts and impressions which I am most liable to forget that I have had; which would have in one sense the greatest remoteness, in another, the greatest nearness to me.
’T is healthy to be sick sometimes.
I do not know but the reason why I love some Latin verses more than whole English poems is simply in the elegant terseness and conciseness of the language, an advantage which the individual appears to have shared with his nation.