If anyone can achieve power, then all will try and government becomes a mere battle in which principle is sacrificed for interest. The lowest will impose themselves, for the best will shun the gutter.

When Sir Philip Sidney was making the grand tour, three centuries ago, he came to Vienna, where he studied horsemanship with Pagliano, who, says Sir Philip, in praise of the horse, became such a poet “that, if I had not been a piece of a logician before I came to him, he would have persuaded me to wish myself a horse.”

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river.
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow forever and forever.

My God, armies slaughtered one another across the plains of Europe, popes hurled anathemas, emperors met, hemophiliac and incestuous, in the hunting lodge of the Palatine gardens, all to supply a cover, a sumptuous facade for the work of these wireless operators who in the House of Solomon were listening for pale echoes from the Umbilicus Mundi.

Literature, like virtue, is its own reward, and the enthusiasm some experience in the permanent enjoyments of a vast library, have far outweighed the neglect or the calumny of the world, which some of its votaries have received. From the time that Cicero poured forth his feelings in his oration for the poet Archias, innumerable are the testimonies of men of letters of the pleasurable delirium of their researches; that delicious beverage which they have swallowed, so thirstily, from the magical cup of literature.

Men are continually in search of some sequestered retreat, some villa on the sea-shore, or on some airy mountain. And you, my friend, were formerly very much attached to retirement. But this is evidently a mere vulgar conception of things. You have it in your power, at any time and in any place, to retire into yourself; and where can a man find a more peaceful or more undisturbed repose than in his own soul? Especially one who, when he looks into his own breast, finds nothing there but a perfect calm; such a calm I mean as arises from order and well-regulated passions and affections.

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

The neighbourhood was a dreary one at that time; as oppressive, sad, and solitary by night, as any about London. There were neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy waste of road near the great blank Prison. A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcases of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some speculator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which – having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet weather – they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves.

But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.