The Oil And Wine Of Merry Meeting.

Nature Seems To Delight In Disappointing The Assuduities Of Art, With Which It Would Rear Dulness To Maturity, And To Glory In The Vigor And Luxuriance Of Her Chance Productions. She Scatters The Seeds Of Genius To The Winds, And Though Some May Perish Among The Stony Places Of The World, And Some May Be Choked By The Thorns And Brambles Of Early Adversity, Yet Others Will Now And Then Strike Root Even In The Clefts Of The Rock, Struggle Bravely Up Into Sunshine, And Spread Over Their Sterile Birthplace All The Beauties Of Vegetation.

It Is Almost Startling To Hear This Warning Of Departed Time Sounding Among The Tombs, And Telling The Lapse Of The Hour, Which, Like A Billow, Has Rolled Us Onward Towards The Grave.

There Is Nothing In England That Exercises A More Delightful Spell Over My Imagination Than The Lingerings Of The Holiday Customs And Rural Games Of Former Times. They Recall The Pictures My Fancy Used To Draw In The May Morning Of Life, When As Yet I Only Knew The World Through Books, And Believed It To Be All That Poets Had Painted It; And They Bring With Them The Flavour Of Those Honest Days Of Yore, In Which, Perhaps With Equal Fallacy, I Am Apt To Think The World Was More Home-bred, Social, And Joyous Than At Present.

The Great British Library --an Immense Collection Of Volumes Of All Ages And Languages, Many Of Which Are Now Forgotten, And Most Of Which Are Seldom Read: One Of These Sequestered Pools Of Obsolete Literature To Which Modern Authors Repair, And Draw Buckets Full Of Classic Lore, Or Pure English, Undefiled Wherewith To Swell Their Own Scanty Rills Of Thought.

No Man Knows What The Wife Of His Bosom Is Until He Has Gone With Her Through The Fiery Trials Of This World.