The Public Is A Bad Guesser.

Cows Are Amongst The Gentlest Of Breathing Creatures; None Show More Passionate Tenderness To Their Young When Deprived Of Them; And, In Short, I Am Not Ashamed To Profess A Deep Love For These Quiet Creatures.

All Is Finite In The Present; And Even That Finite Is Infinite In It Velocity Of Flight Towards Death. But In God There Is Nothing Finite...upon A Night Of Earthquake He Builds A Thousand Years Of Pleasant Habitations For Man. Upon The Sorrow Of An Infant He Raises Oftentimes From Human Intellects Glorious Vintages That Could Not Else Have Been.

A Great Scholar, In The Highest Sense Of The Term, Is Not One Who Depends Simply On An Infinite Memory, But Also On An Infinite And Electrical Power Of Combination; Bringing Together From The Four Winds, Like The Angel Of The Resurrection, What Else Were Dust From Dead Men's Bones, Into The Unity Of Breathing Life.

Books, We Are Told, Propose To Instruct Or To Amuse. Indeed! A True Antithesis To Knowledge, In This Case, Is Not Pleasure, But Power. All That Is Literature Seeks To Communicate Power; All That Is Not Literature, To Communicate Knowledge.

Under Our Present Enormous Accumulation Of Books, I Do Affirm That A Most Miserable Distraction Of Choice Must Be Very Generally Incident To The Times; That The Symptoms Of It Are In Fact Very Prevalent, And That One Of The Chief Symptoms Is An Enormous 'gluttonism' For Books.