GENIUS IN SUNSHINE AND SHADOW. By the Same Author EDGE-TOOLS OF SPEECH. One fine octavo volume. $3.50. "A vast storehouse of the best thought of the world."--_Boston: Home Journal._ "Will find its way into thousands of families. It is a volume to take up when a few minutes of leisure are found, and it will always be read with interest."--_Boston Journal._ "'Edge-Tools of Speech' is one of the best books of quotation in the language. It is indispensable in the library and at the office."--_Gazette._ "He has classified his quotations alphabetically under the head of subjects ('Ability,' 'Absence,' etc.), and has collected the most famous literary or historical sayings bearing on each subject. Thus the word 'Ability' is made the text of wise utterances from Napoleon I., Dr. Johnson, Wendell Phillips, Longfellow, Maclaren, Gail Hamilton, Froude, Beaconsfield, Zoroaster, Schopenhauer, La Rochefoucauld, Matthew Wren, Gibbon, and Aristotle. It has no rival."--_Christian Union._ "The book is one which will at once command a place on the reference-shelf of every well-appointed library, and which will be a most useful aid to every literary man."--_Boston Courier._ "To open it at random anywhere is to chance upon the wisdom of the ages. Every important authority of every age and clime is represented. The choicest reading of a lifetime is brought, in its salient points, into the limits of this volume."--_Boston Traveller._ *** _For sale by all booksellers. Sent, post-paid, upon receipt of price_, TICKNOR AND COMPANY, BOSTON. GENIUS IN SUNSHINE AND SHADOW BY MATURIN M. BALLOU AUTHOR OF "EDGE-TOOLS OF SPEECH," ETC. 'Tis in books the chief Of all perfection to be plain and brief. BUTLER BOSTON TICKNOR AND COMPANY 1887 _Copyright, 1886_, BY MATURIN M. BALLOU. _All rights reserved._ University Press: JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE. PREFACE. The volume in hand might perhaps better have been entitled "Library Notes," as the pages are literally the gathered notes of the author's library-hours. The reader will kindly peruse these pages remembering that they assume only to be the gossip, as it were, of the author with himself,--notes which have grown to these proportions by casual accumulation in the course of other studies, and without consecutive purpose. That these notes thus made have been put into printed form, is owing to the publisher's chance knowledge and hearty approval of them. These few lines are by way, not of apology,--no sensible person ever made an apology, according to Mr. Emerson,--but of introduction; so that the reader may not fancy he is to encounter a labored essay upon the theme suggested by the title of the volume.