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Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten, when their noblest and most enduring works decay? Death comes even to monumental structures, and oblivion rests on the most illustrious names.-Ausonius.

Nothing maintains its bloom forever; age succeeds to age.-Cicero.

Mutability is the badge of infirmity. It is seldom that a man continues to wish and design the same thing two days alike. Now he is for marrying; and now a mistress is preferred to a wife. Now he is ambitious and aspiring; presently the meanest servant is not more humble than he. This hour he squanders his money away; the next he turns miser. Sometimes he is frugal and serious; at other times profuse, airy, and gay.-Charron.

The uncertainty of events disturbs the purest enjoyments.-De Lévis.

The worthy gentleman who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of the contest, whilst his desires were as warm and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.-Burke.

Ye gods, ready to grant the highest prosperity, and slow to preserve it! —Lucan.

In human life there is a constant change of fortune; and it is unreasonable to expect an exemption from the common fate. Life itself decays, and all things are daily changing.

Plutarch.

Clocks will go as they are set; but man, irregular man, is never constant, never certain. Otway.

We see scarcely anything, just or unjust, that does not change its quality with its climate. Three degrees of latitude upset all the principles of jurisprudence; a meridian determines what is truth, or a few years of settled authority. Fundamental laws may vary. Right has its epochs. Droll justice, indeed, that a river or a mountain limits! Truth on one side of the Pyrenees is error on the other.-Pascal.

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Where there is mystery, it is generally supMan must be prepared for every event of posed that there must also be evil.-Byron. life, for there is nothing that is durable.

Menander.

Time, whose millioned accidents creep in betwixt vows, and change decrees of kings, tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharpest intents, divert strong minds to the course of altering things.-Shakespeare.

The blessings of health and fortune, as they have a beginning, so they must also have an end. Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.-Sallust.

MYTHOLOGY.

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NAME.

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"A person with a bad name is already half hanged," saith the old proverb.-Whipple.

With the vulgar and the learned, names have great weight; the wise use a writ of inquiry into their legitimacy when they are advanced as authority.-Zimmermann.

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National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice. Samuel Smiles.

NATIVE LAND.

A man's love for his native land lies deeper than any logical expression, among those pulses of the heart which vibrate to the sanctities of home, and to the thoughts which leap up from his fathers' graves.-Chapin.

NATURE.

Nature does not capriciously scatter her secrets as golden gifts to lazy pets and luxurious darlings, but imposes tasks when she presents opportunities, and uplifts him whom she would inform. The apple that she drops at the feet of Newton is but a coy invitation to follow her to the stars.-Whipple.

Nature is man's religious book, with lessons for every day.-Theodore Parker.

All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches

Some to the fascination of a name surrender on the mountain; the river, its channel in the judgment hoodwinked.-Cowper.

Some men do as much begrudge others a good name, as they want one themselves; and perhaps that is the reason of it.-William Penn.

What is in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.Shakespeare.

Who hath not owned, with rapture-smitten frame, the power of grace, the magic of a name?-Couper.

It was a charming fancy of the Pythagoreans to exchange names when they met, that so they might partake of the virtues each admired in the other. And, knowing the power of names, they used only such as were musical and pleasing.-Alcott.

I do beseech you (chiefly, that I may set it in my prayers), what is your name?—

Shakespeare.

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A nation's character is the sum of its splendid deeds; they constitute one common patrimony, the nation's inheritance. They awe foreign powers, they arouse and animate our own people.-Henry Clay.

soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf, their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow or along the ground, but prints, in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of its fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds, the sky of tokens, the ground is all memoranda and signatures, and every object covered over with hints which speak to the intelligent.

Emerson.

How hard it is to hide the sparks of nature! Shakespeare.

Nature never deserts the wise and pure; no plot so narrow, be but nature there, no waste so vacant, but may well employ each faculty of sense, and keep the heart awake to love and beauty!-Coleridge.

Art may err, but nature cannot miss.

Dryden.

Let not a man trust his victory over his nature too far; for nature will lie buried a great time, and yet revive upon the occasion of temptation, like as it was with Æsop's damsel, turned from a cat to a woman, who sat very demurely at the board's end till a mouse ran before her.-Bacon.

I have been reasoning all my life, and find Nationality is the aggregated individuality of that all argument will vanish before one touch the greatest men of the nation.-Kossuth. of nature.-Colman.

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Nature always springs to the surface and manages to show what she is. It is vain to stop or try to drive her back. She breaks through every obstacle, pushes forward, and at last makes for herself a way.-Boileau.

Nature cannot be surprised in undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere.-Emerson.

Everything made by man may be destroyed by man; there are no ineffaceable characters except those engraved by nature; and nature makes neither princes, nor rich men, nor great lords.-Rousseau.

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Nature wears not the pale livery which inspires meditation or solemn joy; her face seems wreathed in a perpetual smile. The landscape breathes, indeed, of intoxicating delight; it invites to present joy; but it leads to no tender reminiscences of the past, nor gives solemn indications of the future.-Talfourd.

Looks through nature up to nature's God.-
Pope.

Nature has perfections, in order to show that she is the image of God; and defects, in order to show that she is only his image.-Pascal.

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Knowing that nature never did betray the heart that loved her.- Wordsworth.

Nature was his nurse and playfellow. For him she would let slip between the leaves golden shafts of sunlight that fell just within his grasp; she would send wandering breezes to visit him with the balm of bay and resinous gums; to him the tall red-woods nodded familiarly and sleepily, the bumble-bees buzzed, and the rooks cawed a slumberous accompaniment.

Bret Harte.

Nature alone is permanent.-Longfellow.

Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his footstep with the violet and the rose, and bend her lines of grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling child.-Emerson.

The poetry of earth is never dead.-Keats.

He that follows nature is never out of his way. Nature is sometimes subdued, but seldom extinguished.-Bacon.

God has placed nature by the side of man as a friend who remains always near to guide and console him in life; as a protecting genius who conducts him, as well as all species, to a harmonious unity with himself. The earth is the maternal bosom which bears all the races; nature arouses man from the sleep in which he would remain without thought of himself, inspires him, and preserves thus in humanity activity and life.-Ritter.

Nature, like a kind and smiling mother, lends herself to our dreams and cherishes our fancies.-Victor Hugo.

O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all; the earth is full of thy riches.-Bible.

Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the shortest way to her ends. As the general says to his soldiers, "If you want a fort, build a fort," so nature makes every creature do its own work and get its living, be it planet, animal, or tree.-Emerson.

Nature is but a name for an effect, whose cause is God.-Cowper.

Nature is sanitive, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew! Every inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the bloom of youth and love.-Emerson.

The living, visible garment of God.-Goethe.

There is a signature of wisdom and power impressed upon the works of God, which evidently distinguishes them from the feeble imitations of men. Not only the splendor of the sun, but the glimmering light of the glowworm, proclaims his glory.-Rev. John Newton.

All nature's difference keeps all nature's peace.-Pope.

Natural objects themselves, even when they make no claim to beauty, excite the feelings, and occupy the imagination. Nature pleases, attracts, delights, merely because it is nature. We recognize in it an Infinite Power.

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What profusion is there in His work! When trees blossom there is not a single breastpin, but a whole bosom-full of gems; and of leaves they have so many suits that they can throw them away to the winds all summer long. What unnumbered cathedrals has He reared in the forest shades, vast and grand, full of curious carvings, and haunted evermore by tremulous One touch of nature makes the whole world music; and in the heavens above, how do stars kin.-Shakespeare.

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seem to have flown out of His hand faster than sparks out of a mighty forge! -Beecher.

Nature is an Æolian harp, a musical instrument, whose tones are the re-echo of higher strings within us.s.-Novalis.

Give nature a place to stand upon, and she cannot be entirely subdued by art. An orangetree in a box is still a tree, and even a yew cut into the shape of St. George and the dragon is more of a growth than a manufacture.—

Hillard

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If we did not take great pains, and were not at great expense to corrupt our nature, our nature would never corrupt us.-Clarendon.

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.-Dickens.

Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age.-Carlyle.

Perhaps, if we could penetrate nature's secrets, we should find that what we call weeds are more essential to the well being of the world than the most precious fruit or grain.— Hawthorne.

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Search out the wisdom of Nature, there is depth in all her doings; she seemeth prodigal of power, yet her rules are the maxims of frugality.-Tupper.

NEATNESS.

We must avoid fastidiousness; neatness, when it is moderate, is a virtue; but when it is carried to an extreme, it narrows the mind. Fenelon.

NECESSITY. Necessity is the argument of tyrants, it is the creed of slaves.-William Pitt.

A people never fairly begins to prosper till necessity is treading on its heels. The growing want of room is one of the sources of civilization. Population is power, but it must be a population that, in growing, is made daily apprehensive of the morrow. -Simms.

Necessity does everything well.-Emerson.

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We are ruined, not by what we really want, but by what we think we do; therefore, never go abroad in search of your wants; if they be real wants, they will come home in search of you; for he that buys what he does not want will soon want what he cannot buy.-Colton.

Necessity is stronger than human nature.—
Dionysius.

No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man's power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.-Emerson.

Need teacheth unlawful things.-Seneca.

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