That is his way about everything.

I hold any man cheap,--he said,--of whom nothing stronger can be uttered than that all his geese are swans .-- How is that, Professor ?--said I;--I should have set you down for one of that sort .-- Sir,--said he,--I am proud to say, that Nature has so far enriched me, that I cannot own so much as a duck without seeing in it as pretty a swan as ever swam the basin in the garden of the Luxembourg.

And the Professor showed the whites of his eyes devoutly, like one returning thanks after a dinner of many courses.
I don't know anything sweeter than this leaking in of Nature through all the cracks in the walls and floors of cities.

You heap up a million tons of hewn rocks on a square mile or two of earth which was green once.

The trees look down from the hill-sides and ask each other, as they stand on tiptoe,--"What are these people about ?" And the small herbs at their feet look up and whisper back,--"We will go and see." So the small herbs pack themselves up in the least possible bundles, and wait until the wind steals to them at night and whispers, "Come with me." Then they go softly with it into the great city,--one to a cleft in the pavement, one to a spout on the roof, one to a seam in the marbles over a rich gentleman's bones, and one to the grave without a stone where nothing but a man is buried,--and there they grow, looking down on the generations of men from mouldy roofs, looking up from between the less-trodden pavements, looking out through iron cemetery- railings.