Washington Irving

The vast space of waters that separate the hemispheres is like a blank page in existence.

Hunting came next to war in those days, as the occupation of the nobility and gentry.

I saw his grief was eloquent, and I let it have its flow; for sorrow relieves itself by words.

He had acquired the magic of method, which of itself works wonders.

In a word, Rip was ready to attend to anybody’s business but his own; but as to doing family duty, and keeping his farm in order, he found it impossible.

Indian paths and buffalo tracks are the primitive highways of the wilderness.

The tissue of misrepresentations attempted to be woven round us, are like cobwebs woven round the limbs of an infant giant. Our country continually outgrows them.

Poor savages! Between their "fathers," the French, and their "brothers," the English, they were in a fair way of being most lovingly shared out of the whole country.

I believe in broken hearts, and the possibility of dying of disappointed love!

We soon tire of the same prospect.

It is, indeed, the gift of poetry, to hallow every place in which it moves; to breathe around nature an odor more exquisite than the perfume of the rose, and to shed over it a tint more magical than the blush of morning.

The French, he said, were cowards; the English, fools.

I felt that this living monument of real grief was worth them all.

All looked as if arrayed for a fête, rather than a battle.

Many a man of passable information at the present day reads scarcely anything but reviews, and before long a man of erudition will be little better than a mere walking catalogue.

They would sooner starve than carry a few days' provisions on their backs.

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced.

The vast flotilla proceeded slowly down the lake, with banners and pennons fluttering in the summer breeze; arms glittering in the sunshine, and martial music echoing along the wood-clad mountains.

Nothing impresses the mind with a deeper feeling of loneliness than to tread the silent and deserted scene of former throng and pageant.

The afternoon passed away like a dream.