It seemed as if the breezes brought him; It seemed as if the sparrows taught him; As if by secret sight he knew Where, in the far fields, the orchis grew.

He saw the partridge drum in the woods; He heard the woodcock's evening hymn; He found the tawny thrushes' broods; And the shy hawk did wait for him; What others did at distance hear, And guessed within the thicket's gloom, Was shown to…

When the female is on her nest the male woodcock flies straight up into the sky, folds his wings and falls down through the air, coming down within a foot or two of the nest from which he ascended, pouring out a beautiful song, which he…

He once told us that it was wicked to eat animal food; that the animal had the same right to his life that we had to ours, and we had no right to destroy the lives of any of God's creatures for our own purposes.

He was a moody and solitary person, except in the company of a few close friends who testified to the charming and delightful quality of his companionship.

I suppose his poems will outlast a great many greater reputations.

I think if George Curtis had dwelt almost anywhere but in New York city, he would have been a very powerful influence in the public life of his generation.

I think you establish his legitimacy quite satisfactorily and in any future edition of my Lives of the Chief Justices I shall certainly avail myself of your researches.

There is no people but will strive to excell in something: what can we excell in if not in holinesse?

But when the Free Soil movement came in, he would not flinch or abate a jot in his radical Anti-Slavery principles, which were not very agreeable to the proprietors of the cotton mills in Lowell, who depended both for their material and…

But he added, that if he did write such a treatise, he should sum it up in one sentence: "Never have an ass in the chair.

But Robinson was always on the righteous side of any question involving righteousness.

But I think I got more good out of it in learning how the best intelligence of the State of Massachusetts was likely to judge of the questions of morals and duty than I got afterward from my four years in college.

If anybody doubt the capacity of the intellect of woman to rival that of man in any calling requiring the highest intellectual capacity, without in the least forfeiting any quality of a delicate womanhood, let him read the "Life of Sarah…

She became one of the best Greek scholars in the country, and continued, in her latest years, the habit of reading Homer, the tragedians, and Plato.

I cannot better close this imperfect sketch of her life than by giving the whole of it: of no one was it ever more worthily spoken than of her.

Making all the allowance for the point of view, and that I was then a youth looking at my elders who had become famous, and that I am now looking as an old man at young men, I still think there can be no comparison between the college…

It was then the policy of the college to call into its service great men who had achieved eminent distinction in the world without.

It is now its policy to select for its service promising youth, in the hope that they will become great.

But the effect of failure is most mischievous.

I suppose he would be placed by all our writers of history with great unanimity at the head of American historic investigators.

He was undoubtedly the most learned judge in the United States.

He was unquestionably, at the time of his death, the most famous teacher of law in the civilized world.

Yet, somehow, the graduates of Harvard got a good intellectual training from the University.

He has fallen at the very gate of an honorable and eminent career, and a thousand hopes are buried in his grave.