The birch, most shy and lady-like of trees, Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves, And hints at her foregone gentilities With some saved relics of … - James Russell Lowell

[I]t takes a great great deal of salt to keep scurrility sweet.

One of the most curious of these frenzies of exclusion was that against the emancipation of the Jews. All share in the government of the world was denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most tenacious, race that had ever lived in it - the race to whom we owed our religion and the purest spiritual stimulus and consolation to be found in all literature - a race in which ability seems as natural and hereditary as the curve of their noses, and whose blood, furtively mingling with the bluest bloods in Europe, has quickened them with its own indomitable impulsion.

Soft-heartedness, in times like these,
Shows sof'ness in the upper story.