“ No bit of Greek art is to be viewed as a thing in itself. It is always a fragment, and gets its value from the whole. Every bit of carved stone picked up in Athens is a piece of architecture; so is every speech in a play, every phrase in a dialogue. You must go back and bring in the whole Theatre or the whole Academy, and put back the fragment in its place by means of ladders, before you can guess at its meaning. The inordinate significance that seems to gleam from every broken toy of Greece, results from this very quality—that the object is a part of something else. ”

“ Often, in the midst of a conversation, one of these touching old women would quietly express a longing for death, as if it were a natural fulfillment of an inmost desire. Her sincerity and anticipation were so genuine that I would feel abashed in her presence, ashamed to 'cling to this strange thing that shines in the sunlight, and to be sick with love for it.' Such impressions were in their essence transitory, but one result from the hypothetical visit of the Devil Baby to Hull-House will, I think, remain: a realization of the sifting and reconciling power inherent in Memory, itself. ”

“ A student may throw his hat in the air, grab a megaphone, give 'three long rahs,' go through the gymnastics of a cheer-leader,—putting the most ingenious mechanical toys to shame,—and yet leave some doubt whether he has adequately defined college spirit.
What is this college spirit that hovers over the paid coach and his grandstand—this 'indefinable something,' as one writer calls it, 'which is fanned into a bright flame by intercollegiate athletics'? Shall we judge the spirit by its manifestations in an institution famed above all else for its winning teams and its college spirit? ”

“ Certain flowers always recall to me certain sounds; in most cases the sound associated with a flower is the one heard at the time at which I first saw the flower; and to this day, with the thought of the yellow fringed-orchis is inseparably joined that most persistent and irritating of sounds, the buzzing of the mosquito.
But the true history of a car-window botanist is not always a record of successful achievement, of the triumphant finding of his flower; he also has his haunting disappointments, his glimpses of strange flowers which he is never afterwards able to place. ”

“ I perceived the fresh heart of Christianity in a belief so aged that it had built the pyramids centuries before it set up the temples at Eleusis. Never again shall I be found chattering while the great trumpet blasts for immortality echo down the ages.
But before my mother's death another veil had been lifted for me. Behind it I found the meaning of the cross. The experience will hardly bear words. It was very simple, the issue of intimate daily living, but it transformed one human mind as Bible and church, history and art had never done. ”

“ THE teasing perfection of Greek Literature will perhaps excite the world long after modern literature is forgotten. Shakespeare may come to his end and lie down among the Egyptians, but Homer will endure forever. We hate to imagine such an outcome as this, because, while we love Shakespeare, we regard the Greek classics merely with an overwhelmed astonishment. But the fact is that Homer floats in the central stream of History, Shakespeare in an eddy. There is, too, a real difference between ancient and modern art, and the enduring power may be on the side of antiquity. ”

“ We do not understand sophistication. The Greek has pushed aesthetic analysis further than the modern can bear. We follow well enough through the light issues, but when the deeper questions are reached we lose our footing. At this point the modern cries out in applause, 'Religion, philosophy, pure feeling, the soul!'—He cries out, 'Mystic cult, Asiatic influence, Nature worship,—deep things over there!'—Or else he cries, 'What amazing cruelty, what cynicism!' And yet it is none of these things, but only the artistic perfection of the work which is moving us. ”

“ There is not much in the literary life that would interest an outdoor dog. I felt somewhat like a dry-as-dust professor married to a young and attractive wife who is being taken to all the routs and parties throughout the neighborhood by a disgustingly youthful and handsome cavalier. I know nothing quite so shriveling to the soul as jealousy, nor anything so hard to fight against. I reasoned that Viola's expeditions were doing her good, that I ought to be grateful for them, and I repeated the antediluvian fallacy that my jealousy was only indicative of my love. ”

“ There is, for example, her moral insistence upon form and beauty. If you could live in her house for a day you would see Hellenism as a diurnal practice. Her taste is flawless; everything she touches turns to beauty and to a tranquillizing order and simplicity. She selects a vase or a baking dish with the æsthetic fastidiousness which beset the artists and artisans of Athens.
And, furthermore, she is Greek in her perennial enthusiasm for fresh knowledge. Her enjoyment of life seems to me intense because she is never tired of exploring the world through every kind of human achievement. ”

“ On the other hand, instinct tells him that the larger perfection is cold; that it dwells in the rarefied air of the mountain-tops; that it is un-human. To love the derelict student is treason to his profession; yet, as he looks back over the long line of pupils who have passed through his hands, he sees that the ones who remain warm and vivid in his memory are those who fell most short of the very ideals which he tried to inculcate.
Among all the students in a certain school, I have a living recollection of just one, and he was the most imperfect student in it. ”

“ The most beautiful sight in the world, I once heard it said (by myself, to be honest) , is the expression in the eyes of an intelligent, sweet-tempered pup—a pup old enough to take an interest in things about him, and yet so young as to imagine that everybody will be good to him; so young as not to fear that any man or boy will kick him, or that any dog will take away his bone. ”

“ Likewise, one who watches patiently and devotedly with Homer cannot but become sensible at last how his mind entertains constantly the thought and moving beauty of the various air. Perpetually, it must have been, he was haunted by the freshness and loveliness of it as it moved across the Ægean and the windy isles of Greece. Pure and awful, in the semblance of the blue-eyed Athena, it was the air which passed among his Greek hosts at eventide, or went stirringly among the serried ranks, reviving with a touch the old spirit in them ”

“ We may be certain that chairs will never go out of fashion. We are at the end of bodily evolution in that direction. But to see a white-draped, lanky Hindu, or a red-cloaked lama of the hills, quietly fold up, no matter where he may be, is to witness the perfection of chairless rest. One can read or write or doze comfortably, swaying slightly with a bird's unconscious balance, or, as in my case at present, wholly disarm suspicion on the part of the wild creatures by sinking from the height of a man to that of a jungle deer. ”

“ It was as if the young mother of the grotesque Devil Baby, that victim of wrongdoing on the part of others, had revealed to this tragic woman, much more clearly than soft words had ever done, that the return of a deed of violence upon the head of the innocent is inevitable; as if she had realized that, although she was destined to walk all the days of her life with that piteous multitude who bear the undeserved wrongs of the world, she would walk henceforth with a sense of companionship. ”

“ The very Greek texts themselves have been established through modern research, and the footnotes are the essence of modernity.
The rushing modern world passes like an express train; as it goes, it holds up a mirror to the classic world—a mirror ever changing and ever false. For upon the face of the mirror rests the lens of fleeting fashion. We can no more walk straight to the Greeks than we can walk straight to the moon. In America the natural road to the classics lies through the introductions of German and English scholarship. ”

“ No mere man can ever be so comfortable as a dog looks.
Some persons object to having a dog on the bed at night; and it must be admitted that he lies a little heavily upon one's limbs; but why be so base as to prefer comfort to companionship! To wake up in the dark night, and put your hand on that warm soft body, to feel the beating of that faithful heart—is not this better than undisturbed sloth? ”

“ A certain amount of discipline is necessary for a dog. If left to his own devices, he is apt to become somewhat dissipated, to spend his evenings out, to scatter among many the affection which should be reserved for a few. But, on the other hand, a dog may easily receive too much discipline; he becomes like the child of a despotic father. A dog perfectly trained, from the martinet point of view,—one who never 'jumps up' on you, never lays an entreating paw on your arm, never gets into a chair, or enters the drawing-room,—such a dog is a sad sight to one who really knows and loves the animal. ”

“ But the scent of the giant armadillo eluded us. When we waded through some new, strange odor I looked back at Nupee, hoping for some sign that it was the one we sought. But that night the great armored creatures went their way and we ours, and the two did not cross. Nupee showed me a track at the trail-side made long ago, as wide and deep as the spoor of a dinosaur, and I fingered it reverently as I would have touched the imprint of a recently alighted pterodactyl, taking care not to spoil the outlines of the huge claw-marks. ”

“ Nature seems to have apportioned the voices of many of her creatures with sensitive regard for their environment. Sombre voices seem fittingly to be associated with subdued light, and joyous notes with the blaze of sunlit twigs and open meadows. A bobolink's bubbling carol is unthinkable in a jungle, and the strain of a wood pewee on a sunny hillside would be like an organ playing dance-music. ”

“ But after all, the plain truth is that adventure consists less in the experiences one actually has than in the indefatigable expectancy with which one awaits them. Indeed, I sometimes fear that people must be divided into those who have adventures and those who appreciate them. And between the two the affinity for adventure is greater treasure than the experiencing of it. If we are possessed of the affinity, adventure itself is, at most, just round the corner from us. This opens the life of adventure to all who crave it. ”

“ By college spirit some men mean this and far more: they mean that loyalty to a college which rivets a man to the severest tasks of scholarship, through which he gains intellectual power and enthusiasm, without which no graduate is an entire credit to any college; and finally they mean that vision of an ideal life beyond Commencement which shows a man that only through the rigid subordination of transient and trivial pleasures can he hope to become the only great victory a university ever wins—a trained, devoted, and inspired alumnus, working for the welfare of mankind. ”

“ We are obliged to make guesses as to its intentions, its humor, its relation to philosophy. If the classics had only possessed a cabinet-sized drama, like our own, we might have been at home there. But this giant-talk, this megaphone-and-buskin method, offers us a problem in dynamics which staggers the imagination. All we can do is to tread lightly and guess without dogmatizing. The typical Athenian, Euripides, was so much deeper-dyed in skepticism than any one since that day, that really no one has ever lived who could cross-question him—let alone expound the meanings of his plays. ”

“ It will not suffice to pay a large sum for a dog of fashionable breed, equip him with a costly collar, and then relegate him to the stable or the kitchen. He should be one of the family, living on equal terms with the others, and their constant companion. The dog's life is short at the best, and every moment of it will be needed for his development. It is wonderful how, year by year, the household pet grows in intelligence, how many words he learns the meaning of, how quick he becomes in interpreting the look, the tone of voice, the mood of the person whom he loves. ”

“ My own feeling is, very strictly, that in old age the world of affairs should be left behind, and one's hours passed pleasantly among pleasant things. Age should be impulsive, light-hearted—brilliant, if you will; it should fill its days with flowers and music and embroidery; it should drive in low carriages behind plump ponies; it should write a pretty, pointed, epistolary hand, and read nothing heavier than memoirs. Intellectuality may be all very well in youth, but in an old lady anything beyond a delicate pedantry is unlovely. ”

“ She did not know about us, or about exiles—that they are always dreaming of a Visit.
It seems a hard thing, sometimes, when night closes the doors of all the little trails, that the day has passed without a visitor. It is true of exiles that they have the most unreasonable expectations of the sort, based perhaps upon the migrations of swallows, and not relinquished until the hour of dusk. Yes, then the little trails of the forest are perceived by the mind's eye—which like a cat's eyes sees them better for the dark—to wander away into an infinite distance and a solitude. ”

“ We watched and called the ghostly kinkajous and held them fascinated with our stream of light; we aroused unnamable creatures which squawked companionably at us and rustled the tree-top leaves; we listened to the whispered rush of passing vampires skimming our faces and were soothed by the hypnotic droning hum which beetles left in their swift wake. Finally we turned and circled through side trails so narrow and so dark that we walked with outstretched arms, feeling for the trunks and lianas, choosing a sloth's gait and the hope of new adventures rather than the glare of my flash on our path. ”

“ It has always seemed to me that the best possible biographer, even including the immortal Boswell, would have been Horatio. Ophelia might have been better still had she kept her poor senses. Even having lost them, she seems to do no less than draw back a shimmering veil from the soul and life of Hamlet in the few remarks she makes concerning him: 'Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?'
Horatio, never having dreamed, certainly, of writing an account of Hamlet's life at all, yet seems to set forth in his few words more of Hamlet than is to be found in all the commentaries. ”