In his ears was the hush rather than rush of the water over the dam, the occasional murmur of a belt of trees that skirted the border of the field, and the dull continuous sound of the beatles at their work below, like a persistent growl of thunder on the horizon.
Had Robert possessed a copy of Robinson Crusoe, or had his grandmother not cast The Lady of the Lake, mistaking it for an idol, if not to the moles and the bats, yet to the mice and the black-beetles, he might have been lying reading it, blind and deaf to the face and the voice of Nature, and years might have passed before a response awoke in his heart.

It is good that children of faculty, as distinguished from capacity, should not have too many books to read, or too much of early lessoning.

The increase of examinations in our country will increase its capacity and diminish its faculty.

We shall have more compilers and reducers and fewer thinkers; more modifiers and completers, and fewer inventors.
He lay gazing up into the depth of the sky, rendered deeper and bluer by the masses of white cloud that hung almost motionless below it, until he felt a kind of bodily fear lest he should fall off the face of the round earth into the abyss.

A gentle wind, laden with pine odours from the sun-heated trees behind him, flapped its light wing in his face: the humanity of the world smote his heart; the great sky towered up over him, and its divinity entered his soul; a strange longing after something 'he knew not nor could name' awoke within him, followed by the pang of a sudden fear that there was no such thing as that which he sought, that it was all a fancy of his own spirit; and then the voice of Shargar broke the spell, calling to him from afar to come and see a great salmon that lay by a stone in the water.