Mrs. Jameson

“ But Govinda looked neither on the earth, nor on the sky. What to him were the stars, or the flowers, or the moon rising in dewy splendour? His eyes were fixed upon one, who was brighter to him than the stars, lovelier than the moon when she drives her antelopes through the heavens, sweeter than the night-flower which opens in her beam.
"O Amrà!" he said, at length, and while he spoke his voice trembled even at its own tenderness, "Amrà! beautiful and beloved sister! thine eyes are filled with the glory of that sparkling firmament! ”

“ Miranda is a consistent, natural, human being. Our impression of her nymph-like beauty, her peerless grace, and purity of soul, has a distinct and individual character. Not only is she exquisitely lovely, being what she is, but we are made to feel that she could not possibly be otherwise than as she is portrayed. She has never beheld one of her own sex; she has never caught from society one imitated or artificial grace. The impulses which have come to her, in her enchanted solitude, are of heaven and nature, not of the world and its vanities. ”

“ What Toronto may be in summer, I cannot tell; they say it is a pretty place. At present its appearance to me, a stranger, is most strangely mean and melancholy. A little ill-built town, on low land, at the bottom of a frozen bay, with one very ugly church, without tower or steeple; some government offices, built of staring red brick, in the most tasteless, vulgar style imaginable; three feet of snow all around; and the grey, sullen, wintry lake, and the dark gloom of the pine forest bounding the prospect: such seems Toronto to me now. ”

“ Rubens is just such a painter as Dryden is a poet, and vice versâ: his women are just like Dryden's women, gross, exaggerated, unrefined animals: his men, like Dryden's men, grand, thinking, acting animals. Like Dryden, he could clothe his genius in thunder, dip his pencil in the lightning and the sunbeams of heaven, and rush fearlessly upon a subject which others had trembled to approach. In both we see a singular and extraordinary combination of the plainest, coarsest realities of life, with the loftiest imagery, the most luxurious tints of poetry. ”

“ If we can still love those who have made us suffer, we love them all the more. It is as if the principle, that conflict is a necessary law of progress, were applicable even to love. For there is no love like that which has roused up the intensest feelings of our nature,—revealed us to ourselves, like lightning suddenly disclosing an abyss,—yet has survived all the storm and tumult of such passionate discord and all the terror of such a revelation. ”

“ Thus a painter equally remarkable for the purity of his taste and deep religious feeling, Niccolò Poussin, has represented Christ, in his agony, supported in the arms of an angel, while a crowd of child-angels, very much like Cupids, appear before him with the instruments of the Passion; ten or twelve bear a huge cross; others hold the scourge, the crown of thorns, the nails, the sponge, the spear, and exhibit them before him, as if these were the images, these the terrors, which could overwhelm with fear and anguish even the human nature of such a Being! ”

“ Love alone can tell; for I have neither words nor skill! She alone is the Lady of gentleness—beside her, all others seem ungracious and unkind. Who can describe her sweetness, her loveliness? to her every virtue bows, and beauty points to her as her own divinity. The mind of man cannot soar so high, nor is it sufficiently purified by divine grace to understand and appreciate all her perfections!"
The vagueness of this portrait is a part of its beauty:—it is like a lovely dream—and probably never had any existence, but in the fancy of the Poet. ”

“ Venice, October 25th.—I feel while I gaze round me, as if I had seen Venice in my dreams—as if it were itself the vision of a dream. We have been here two days; and I have not yet recovered from my first surprise. All is yet enchantment: all is novel, extraordinary, affecting from the many associations and remembrances excited in the mind. Pleasure and wonder are tinged with a melancholy interest; and while the imagination is excited, the spirits are depressed.
The morning we left Padua was bright, lovely, and cloudless. ”

“ Her volubility is like the bird's song; it is the outpouring of a heart filled to overflowing with life, love, and joy, and all sweet and affectionate impulses. She has as much tenderness as mirth, and in her most petulant raillery there is a touch of softness—"By this hand, it will not hurt a fly!" As her vivacity never lessens our impression of her sensibility, so she wears her masculine attire without the slightest impugnment of her delicacy. Shakspeare did not make the modesty of his women depend on their dress, as we shall see further when we come to Viola and Imogen. ”

“ In a spot fairer than the poet's creative pencil ever wrought into a picture for fancy to dwell on—where, at the extremity of the Brahman's garden, the broad and beautiful stream that bounded it ran swiftly to mingle its waves with those of the thrice-holy Ganges; where mangoes raised their huge twisted roots in a thousand fantastic forms, while from their boughs hung suspended the nests of the little Baya birds, which waved to and fro in the evening breeze—there had Amrà and Govinda met together, it might be, without design. ”

“ Love is throned in the eyes of my Beatrice! they ennoble every thing she looks upon! As she passes, men turn and gaze; and whomsoever she salutes, his heart trembles within him; he bows his head, the colour forsakes his cheek, and he sighs for his own unworthiness. Pride and anger fly before her! Assist me, ladies, to do her honour! All sweet thoughts of humble love and good-will spring in the hearts of those who hear her speak, so that it is a blessedness first to behold her, and when she faintly and softly smiles—ah! ”

“ Albert Durer "was a man of extreme ingenuity without being a genius?" Does the man of mere ingenuity step before his age as Albert Durer did, not as an artist only, but as a man of science? Is not genius the creative power? and did not Albert Durer possess this power in an extraordinary degree? Could Fuseli have seen his four apostles, now in the gallery of Munich, when he said that Albert Durer never had more than an occasional glimpse of the sublime? ”

“ The cruel prejudices which would have shut us out from nobler consolation and occupations have ceased in great part, and will soon be remembered only as the rude, coarse barbarism of a by-gone age. Let us then have no more caricatures of methodistical, card-playing, and acrimonious old maids. Let us hear no more of scandal, parrots, cats, and lap-dogs—or worse!—these never-failing subjects of derision with the vulgar and the frivolous, but the source of a thousand compassionate and melancholy feelings in those who can reflect! In the name of humanity and womanhood, let us have no more of them! ”

“ It is singular I should have felt its influence at such a moment: it appears to me that those who, from feeling too strongly, have learnt to consider too deeply, become less sensible to the works of art, and more alive to nature. Are there not times when we turn with indifference from the finest picture or statue—the most improving book—the most amusing poem; and when the very commonest, and every-day beauties of nature, a soft evening, a lovely landscape, the moon riding in her glory through a clouded sky, without forcing or asking attention, sink into our hearts? ”

“ The city, with its fantastic steeples and masses of building, relieved against the clear deep blue of the summer sky—the lights which sparkled in the windows reflected in the broad river, and the various forms and tall masts of the craft anchored above and opposite—the huge hill, with its tiara of fortifications, which, in the sunshine and in the broad day, had disappointed me by its formality, now seen under the soft moonlight, as its long lines of architecture and abrupt angles were projected in brightness or receded in shadow, had altogether a most sublime effect. ”

“ Like a strain of sad sweet music which comes floating by us on the wings of night and silence, and which we rather feel than hear—like the exhalation of the violet dying even upon the sense it charms—like the snow-flake dissolved in air before it has caught a stain of earth—like the light surf severed from the billow, which a breath disperses—such is the character of Ophelia: so exquisitely delicate, it seems as if a touch would profane it; so sanctified in our thoughts by the last and worst of human woes, that we scarcely dare to consider it too deeply. ”

“ Shakspeare—I approach the subject with reverence, and even with fear,—is the only poet I am acquainted with and able to appreciate, who appears to have been really heaven-inspired: the workings of his wondrous and all-embracing mind were directed by a higher influence than ever was exercised by woman, even in the plenitude of her power and her charms. Shakspeare's genius waited not on Love and Beauty, but Love and Beauty ministered to him; he perceived like a spirit; he was created, to create; his own individuality is lost in the splendour, the reality, and the variety of his own conceptions. ”

“ The just gods requite thee with full measure all thou hast done! May the wife I bestow on thee bring to thy bosom all the felicity thou broughtest to me and mine, and thy last hours be calm and bright, as those thy love has prepared for me!"
"Ah, curse me not!" exclaimed Govinda, with a cry of horror; for in the anguish of that moment he felt as if the bitter malediction, thus unconsciously pronounced, was already fulfilling. He flung himself upon the earth in an agony of self-humiliation; he crawled to the feet of his preceptor, he kissed them, he clasped his knees. ”

“ This part of Lake Huron is studded with little islands, which, as well as the neighbouring mainland, are all uninhabited, yet clothed with the richest, loveliest, most fantastic vegetation, and no doubt swarming with animal life.
I cannot, I dare not, attempt to describe to you the strange sensation one has, thus thrown for a time beyond the bounds of civilised humanity, or, indeed, any humanity; nor the wild yet solemn reveries which come over one in the midst of this wilderness of woods and waters. All was so solitary, so grand in its solitude, as if nature unviolated sufficed to herself. ”

“ HARDWICKE.
Who that has exulted over the heroic reign of our gorgeous Elizabeth, or wept over the fate of Mary Stuart, but will remember the name of the only woman whose high and haughty spirit out-faced the lion port of one queen, and whose audacity trampled over the sorrows of the other—
"Brow-beating her fair form, and troubling her sweet pride!" ”

“ The coup-d'œil of Genoa, splendid as it is, is not equal to that of Naples, even setting poetical associations aside: it is built like a crescent round the harbour, rising abruptly from the margin of the water, which makes the view from the sea so beautiful: to the north the hills enclose it round like an amphitheatre. The adjacent country is covered with villas, gardens, vineyards, woods, and olive-groves forming a scene most enchanting to the eye and mind, though of a character very different from the savage luxuriance of the south of Italy. ”

“ And throughout the whole dialogue there is the same overflow of eloquence, the same splendor of diction, the same luxuriance of imagery; yet with an added grandeur, arising from habits of command, from the age, the rank, and the matronly character of Constance. Thus Juliet pours forth her love like a muse in a rapture: Constance raves in her sorrow like a Pythoness possessed with the spirit of pain. The love of Juliet is deep and infinite as the boundless sea: and the grief of Constance is so great, that nothing but the round world itself is able to sustain it. ”

“ We landed at sunset on a flat ledge of rock, free from bushes, which we avoided as much as possible, from fear of mosquitoes and rattle-snakes; and while the men pitched the marquees and cooked supper, I walked and mused.
I wish I could give you the least idea of the beauty of this evening; but while I try to put in words what was before me, the sense of its ineffable loveliness overpowers me now even as it did then. The sun had set in that cloudless splendour, and that peculiar blending of rose and amber light that belongs only to these climes and Italy ”

“ If I were required to express in one word the distinguishing character of Lorenzo's amatory poems, I should say grace: they are full of refined sentiment, elegant simplicity, the most exquisite little touches of description, and illustrations, drawn either from external nature, or from the refined mysteries of platonism; but there is a want of passion, of power, and of pathos; there is no genuine emotion; no overflow of the heart, bursting with its own intense feeling; no voice that cries aloud for our sympathy, and echoes to our inmost bosom. ”