بریده‌هایی از کتاب Three Men in a Boat

It seems to be the rule of this world.  Each person has what he doesn’t want, and other people have what he does want.

Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago.  I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes.

Will it be the same in the future?  Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before?

In the sunlight—in the daytime, when Nature is alive and busy all around us, we like the open hill-sides and the deep woods well enough: but in the night, when our Mother Earth has gone to sleep, and left us waking, oh! the world seems so lonesome, and we get frightened, like children in a silent house.

We feel so helpless and so little in the great stillness, when the dark trees rustle in the night-wind.  There are so many ghosts about, and their silent sighs make us feel so sad.

Sometimes, our pain is very deep and real, and we stand before her very silent, because there is no language for our pain, only a moan.  Night’s heart is full of pity for us: she cannot ease our aching; she takes our hand in hers, and the little world grows very small and very far away beneath us,

Sunlight is the life-blood of Nature.  Mother Earth looks at us with such dull, soulless eyes, when the sunlight has died away from out of her.  It makes us sad to be with her then; she does not seem to know us or to care for us.  She is as a widow who has lost the husband she loved, and her children touch her hand, and look up into her eyes, but gain no smile from her.