So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end. - Sarah Orne Jewett

The more one lives out of doors the more personality there seems to be in what we call inanimate things. The strength of the hills and the voice of the waves are no longer only grand poetical sentences, but an expression of something real, and more and more one finds God himself in the world, and believes that we may read the thoughts that He writes for us in the book of Nature.

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.

It is in human nature to respect power; but all his
manliness was at stake, and his natural rights would be degraded and lost, if he could not show his power to be greater than her own.