“He had that sense, or inward prophecy,– which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,– that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime.”

− Nathaniel Hawthorne −