As the spring comes on, and the densening outlines of the elm give daily a new design for a Grecian urn, — its hue, first brown with blossoms, then emerald with leaves, — we appreciate the vanishing beauty of the bare boughs. In our favored temperate zone, the trees denude themselves each year, like the goddesses before Paris, that we… — Thomas Wentworth Higginson Copy Share
How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no winter in our year! — Thomas Wentworth Higginson Copy Share Image
After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence. As Ruskin wrote in his earlier… — Thomas Wentworth Higginson Copy Share Image
Only yonder magnificent pine-tree... holds her unchanging beauty throughout the year, like her half-brother, the ocean, whose voice she shares; and only… — Thomas Wentworth Higginson Copy Share Image
Genius is lonely without the surrounding presence of a people to inspire it. — Thomas Wentworth Higginson Copy Share Image
In ancient Boeotia brides were carried home in vehicles whose wheels were burned at the door, in token, that they would never again be… — Thomas Wentworth Higginson Copy Share Image
But days even earlier than these, in April, have a charm, — even days that seem raw and rainy, when the sky is dull and a bequest of March - wind lingers, chasing the squirrel from the tree and the children from the meadows. There is a fascination in walking through these bare early woods, – there is such a… — Thomas Wentworth Higginson Copy Share
Travelers find virtue in a seeming minority in all other countries, and forget that they have left it in a minority at home. — Thomas Wentworth Higginson Copy Share Image
The coarsest father gains a new impulse to labor from the moment of his baby's birth; he scarcely sees it when awake, and yet… — Thomas Wentworth Higginson Copy Share Image
Do not waste a minute - not a second - in trying to demonstrate to others the merits of your performance. If your work… — Thomas Wentworth Higginson Copy Share Image
Many persons sigh for death when it seems far off, but the inclination vanishes when the boat upsets, or the locomotive runs off the… — Thomas Wentworth Higginson Copy Share Image
The Englishman's strong point is his vigorous insularity; that of the American his power of adaptation. Each of these attitudes has its perils. The… — Thomas Wentworth Higginson Copy Share Image
In an audience of rough people a generous sentiment always brings down the house. In the tumult of war both sides applaud a heroic… — Thomas Wentworth Higginson Copy Share Image
All... religions show the same disparity between belief and practice, and each is safe till it tries to exclude the rest. Test each sect by its best or its worst as you will, by its high-water mark of virtue or its low-water mark of vice. But falsehood begins when you measure the ebb of any other religion against the flood-tide… — Thomas Wentworth Higginson Copy Share
There is certainly no defence or water -proof garment against adverse fortune which is, on the whole, so effectual as an habitual sense of… — Thomas Wentworth Higginson Copy Share Image
There are no days in the whole round year more delicious than those which often come to us in the latter half of April...… — Thomas Wentworth Higginson Copy Share Image
