It is as much the duty of all good men to protect and defend the reputation of worthy public servants as to detect public rascals.

Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing.

If you are not too large for the place, you are too small for it.

Young men talk of trusting to the spur of the occasion.  That trust is vain.  Occasions can not make spurs.  If you expect to wear spurs, you must win them.  If you wish to use them, you must buckle them to your own heels before you go into the fight.

Greek is perhaps the most perfect instrument of thought ever invented by man, and its literature has never been equaled in purity of style and boldness of expression.

Great ideas travel slowly, and for a time noiselessly, as the gods whose feet were shod with wool.

What the arts are to the world of matter, literature is to the world of mind.

History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy.

The world’s history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto and every man a word.  Its strains have been pealing along down the centuries, and though there have been mingled the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian, philosopher, and historian—­the humble listener—­there has been a divine melody running through the song which speaks of hope and halcyon days to come.

Light itself is a great corrective.  A thousand wrongs and abuses that are grown in darkness disappear like owls and bats before the light of day.

Liberty can be safe only when suffrage is illuminated by education.

Parties have an organic life and spirit of their own, an individuality and character which outlive the men who compose them; and the spirit and traditions of a party should be considered in determining their fitness for managing the affairs of the nation.

      Of Garfield’s finished days,
      So fair, and all too few,
    Destruction which at noonday strays
      Could not the work undo.

      O martyr, prostrate, calm! 
      I learn anew that pain
    Achieves, as God’s subduing psalm,
      What else were all in vain.

      Like Samson in his death
      With mightiest labor rife,
    The moments of thy halting breath
      Were grandest of thy life.

      And now amid the gloom
      Which pierces mortal years,
    There shines a star above thy tomb
      To smile away our tears.

* * * * *

XI.

WHAT I CARRIED TO COLLEGE.

A REMINISCENCE AT FORTY—­PICTURES OF RURAL LIFE.

    Nobody has brought me a kiss to-day,
    As forty comes marching along life’s way;

    At least, only such as came in a letter,—­
    And two hundred leagues from home, the debtor!