George Cary Eggleston

“ It enlisted in the anti-slavery cause every gentle and every rampant impulse of the people of the North. It rubbed out of multitudes of men's minds every consideration of constitutional restriction, every thought of states' rights, every dogma of the law and every decree of the courts. It quickly bred a new crusade against slavery. It everywhere stimulated the thought that slavery was a wrong for which the whole Nation was responsible and the extermination of which, at all costs, the Union was bound to accomplish as its first and highest duty. ”

“ The weight of the steed and the speed at which he was moving would be sufficient, Boyd Westover thought, to crush a way through the barrier. It was likely to cost the beautiful animal his life, but what of that? There was another life at stake, in rescue of which the young man was ready to sacrifice even his own—for the life in peril was that of the woman he loved, the woman who had awakened all the passion, all the tenderness, all the chivalry of his brave young soul. To save her he would have doomed any and every other living thing to cruel death. ”

“ With that she rang for her maid and bade her prepare a cold plunge bath. When she descended to dinner, an hour later, Agatha no longer chattered frivolously, as she had done in the carriage, by way of concealing her emotions, but bore herself seriously, as became her in view of the prospect of battle on the morrow.
In that hour of agonising thought, Agatha Ronald had ceased to be a girl, and had become an earnest, resolute woman, strong to do, strong to endure, and, if need be, strong to dare. Life had taken on a new meaning in her eyes. ”

“ The old life of the Old Dominion is a thing of the dead past, a memory merely, and one so different from anything that exists anywhere on earth now, that every reflection of it seems the fabric of a dream. But its glamor holds possession of my mind even after the lapse of half a century of years, and the greatest joy I have known in life has come from my efforts to depict it in romances that are only a veiled record of facts. ”

“ The blood of our women and children recently spilt at Fort Mims calls for our vengeance; it must not call in vain. Our borders must no longer be disturbed by the war-whoop of these savages and the cries of their suffering victims. The torch that has been lighted up must be made to blaze in the heart of their own country. It is time they should be made to feel the weight of a power which, because it was merciful, they believed to be impotent. ”

“ For you are a very wise woman, Barbara, though you do not know it. You look things squarely in the face. You think soundly because you think with absolute and fearless sincerity. You are shy and timid, and self-distrustful. Thank God, you will never grow completely out of that, as so many women do. Your modesty will always remain a crown of glory to your character. But as you grow older, retaining your instinctive impulse to do well every duty that may lie before you, you will acquire enough of self-confidence to equip you for all emergencies. ”

“ Everet seldom leaves Helen's side. When he is not with her, he is watching her. The house is too crowded for comfort, and Helen has not had enough experience yet to enjoy it. She always feels a little bewildered after one o'clock, and remarks to Everet as he stands by her while she leans back in a chair, wearily, that she always feels as though she ought to be in bed after eleven. She laughs, a sweet, excited little laugh as she looks up at him. He wonders how long so charming a child will retain her naïveté in such an atmosphere. ”

“ Running rapidly, bank full, with tall trees bending over and throwing their shadows across it, with here and there a fragment of a moon glade on the water, while the dense undergrowth of the woods, lying in shadow, gave the stream a margin of inky blackness on each side,—it was a scene to stimulate the imaginations of the group of healthy boys who sat in the boat gliding silently but swiftly down the river.
Hour after hour they sped on, not a boy among them in the least disposed to avail himself of Sam's permission to lie down for a nap on the moss in the bottom of the boat. ”

“ But before Jack had finished, the old dream of life and love, with Margaret for its saint and sovereign, had revived in his mind. What if, after all, Jack Towns should be able to unravel the mystery of Margaret's silence and open a way for him? In that moment all the love he had cherished for Margaret surged back upon his soul in an overwhelming flood that made all other women objects of courteous but complete indifference. He saw clearly that no woman on earth could ever take the place in his heart that this one woman had made her own. ”

“ What a record of imbecility in control of genius, of incapacity in command of the highest ability, of small men in great places, and of great men restrained from action by the superior authority of other men immeasurably their inferiors, who by luck, or circumstance or official favor came into authority and position which they in no wise deserved, and which they were utterly incapable of using effectively in behalf of the cause they were set to serve! And what a price the country—North and South—was called upon to pay in blood and treasure and heartbreak, for all this misplacing of men! ”

“ Here was that degradation of mind and soul which frankly regards crime—even including the murder of innocent persons—as a legitimate means of livelihood—like the picking of blackberries—a degradation which nevertheless leaves the soul capable of emotions of affection and tender pity such as this man so manifestly felt for his invalid wife and his "little gal."
Unhappily this degradation, this perversion of the moral sense, is not confined to mountain moonshiners. There is very much of it in our great cities and it is the thing that gives the police force their hardest work. ”

“ One evening General Field was smoking a long pipe before my fire, and he and I were chatting about war times—we hadn’t yet got far enough away from the war to regard any other topic as worthy of intelligent conversation.
“The saddest part of it all, to us of the old army at least,” said General Field, “is the breaking up of old friendships. There’s Buell, now. He and I once tented together, messed together, slept under the same blankets together, and, without any blankets at all, under the same frozen sky; marched together, fought together, suffered together, and endured together. ”

“ Mingles the romance of the forest with the romance of man’s heart, making a story that is big and elemental, while not lacking in sweetness and tenderness. It is an epic of the life of the lumber-men of the great forest of the Northwest, permeated by out of door freshness, and the glory of the struggle with nature. ”

“ How shall men ever repay the debt they owe to wifehood and motherhood? How shall civilization itself sufficiently honor the womanhood that alone has made it possible?
But while Richard Temple knew that there was never a murmur at her lot in Mary's heart any more than there was complaining upon her lips, he knew also how earnestly she longed for a better place in the world for him, how intensely ambitious she was that he should find fit opportunity and make the most of it in the way of winning that recognition at the hands of men which her loving soul knew to be his right and his due. ”

“ At Petersburg these women did not look to the morrow at all, but their courage was the same, their cheer the same, their devotion the same. It was still their chosen task to encourage the little remnant of an army which still held the defensive works with a line stretched out to attenuation. To the very end—and even after the end—these brave women faltered not nor failed.
When the war began, the women of the South made a gala-day of every day when soldiers were in sight. As the war neared its calamitous end, all days were to them days of mourning and of always willing self-sacrifice. ”

“ YOUNGBLOOD’S LAST MORNING WE were all well used to seeing men shot, but this was different.
It was a soft, warm, mellow autumn morning. It was a day suggestive of all gentleness. A purple, Indian-summer haze enveloped the earthworks and the camps. Nature had issued an invitation to peace and repose. The cannon were not at work. Nobody on either side had been tempted to bombard anybody else. Even the mortars and the sharp-shooters were still.
It was not the kind of morning for the bloody work of war.
Yet a young man was to be killed within the hour. ”

“ Why should it not mean everything to her that womanhood longs for? Why should you not win Evelyn’s love and make her your wife? I never knew two people better fitted to make each other happy, and fortunately you have possessions in Europe and at the North which will enable you to take a wife, no matter how disastrously this war may end for us of the South. Believe me, Owen, in creating men and women, God intended marriage and happiness in marriage for the common lot of humanity. ”

“ The home is immeasurably more important, as a factor in human life, and in national life, than the mart, or the senate, or the pulpit, or any other influence can be. It is in happy homes that the saving virtues of humanity are born and nourished. From such homes, more than from all the pulpits, and all the institutions of learning, there flows an influence for good that sweetens all life, preserves morality, and keeps us human beings fit to live. Oh, Barbara, you will never know how longingly I dream of such a home with you at its head! ”

“ Since the night in Everet's house, he has been the friend, not the lover. The old life sometimes comes over her as it has to-night. The old sweet life, the old sweet love—and yet, the old love would not satisfy her now, if it must be linked with the old life. That is an unacknowledged reason for her obduracy. Love without money? Yes. Love without power, excitement, intrigue? No. If this has poisoned all her days, yet it is a delicious poison.
At times she is consumed with a sense of the mortification and indignity of those last months with Braine. ”

“ The time has come when the prowess of the American soldier, equally on the one side and upon the other, his measureless courage, his exhaustless endurance, his all-defiant devotion to duty, his extraordinary steadiness under a fire such as few soldiers on earth have ever been called upon to face, his patience under long marchings, starvation and every circumstance of suffering, are subjects of justly indiscriminate admiration on both sides of a geographical line long since obliterated. ”

“ Then he wrote:
"You see how shrewdly I have managed this thing, Ladybird. I wouldn't let you go to The Oaks till you had become too fully confirmed in your habit of being free, ever to be reformed."
Later, and more seriously, he said to the girl:
"Every human being is the better for being free—women as well as men. Liberty to a human being is like sunshine and fresh air. Restraint is like medicine—excellent for those who are ill, but very bad indeed for healthy people. Did it ever occur to you, Agatha, that you never took a pill or a powder in your life? ”

“ Obviously Boyd Westover had recovered his vigor and was again fit to call himself by the name his forebears had borne for generations past—Westover of Wanalah—a name which in that community had always stood for virility, courage and uncompromising honor; a name that had meant secure peace to those who deserved peace and quick war to those who were hostilely disposed; a name that had always represented what is best in manhood, both in its tenderly forbearing gentleness of impulse and its relentless strength of purpose. ”

“ The Confederacy is eternally dead. The Union survives. What choice is left to us who followed Lee, except to reconcile ourselves with our new environment and help with all our might to preserve and perpetuate within the Union and by means of it, all of liberty and self-government, and human rights, that we have tried to maintain by the establishment of the Confederacy? We must either join heart and soul in that work, or we must idly sulk, living in the dead past and leaving it to our adversaries to do, without our help, the great good that, if we do not sulk, we can so mightily help in doing. ”

“ She sobs away the night on her knees.
The months have rushed by. The time is long enough for the suffering—very short for so many agonies to be crowded into. Braine loves her as he has never loved her before. Sometimes he experiences a momentary emotion of gladness and desire for this child—but not often.
He seldom thinks of all that her condition means; and sometimes almost forgets that anything unaccustomed is or will be,—made forgetful by Helen's beauty and charm and brightness. He seldom thinks of her condition save as a cause that has had the effect to make him love her more. ”

“ It is difficult, indeed it is impossible to trace and unravel to the full the influences which in 1861 brought the North and South into armed conflict and created a war of stupendous proportions between men who had for generations rejoiced in a common heritage of liberty; men who had cherished alike the memory of Bunker Hill and Yorktown; men who had worshiped the same household gods and honored the same heroes as their national demigods; men to whom the history of the Republic was, to all alike on both sides, the story of their fathers' and grandfathers' heroic deeds. ”

“ Virginia is destined to be the battle-field. Greater armies than have ever before been dreamed of on this continent are going to trample over her fields, and meet in dreadful conflict on the margins of her watercourses. Her homes are going to be desolated, her fields laid waste, her substance utterly exhausted, and her people reduced to poverty in a cause that is not her own, and in behalf of which she unselfishly risks all for the sake of an abstraction, and in defence of a right on the part of other States which Virginia herself had seen no occasion to assert in her own defence. ”