Rebecca Harding Davis

“ Miss Vance brushed the bonnet and carefully rolled up the strings. "Are you satisfied? Is London the London you have been thinking of these twenty years?" she asked.
"Oh, a thousand times more! And George has been with me every day—every day!"
Miss Vance picked up the gloves, looking impatiently at the poor lady's happy face. "Now she has gone off into one of her silly transports of delight, and for no earthly reason!"
"I noticed that George has seen very little of Lisa lately," she said tentatively. "If he really means to marry her——"
"Marry her! Clara! You surely never feared THAT?" ”

“ I do not think he ever said to her that he knew all she had done for him, or thanked her; but no dog or woman that Stephen Holmes loved could look into his eyes, and doubt that love. Sad, masterful eyes, such as are seen but once or twice in a lifetime: no woman but would wish, like Lois, for such eyes to be near her when she came to die, for her to remember the world's love in. She came hobbling back every day to see him after she had gone, and would stay to make his soup, telling him, child-like, how many days it was until Christmas. ”

“ She forgot Lufflin was there, I suppose. Her soul seemed to be in her fingers, her pure passion to envelop the mite of flesh as the weak sunshine did herself, and to hold it in life. There was something in this wife-and-mother-love which poor Lufflin did not understand.
"Well, well," he said, "I'll go now. God bless you, Lotty! You'll let me have a share in this young fellow here, eh?"—and trotted down the back stairs, leaving her in the narrow hall. "Old Mounchere Jacobus must have been a good fellow," he thought, "to have deserved all this. God deals so differently with different men!" ”

“ If you could go into this mill where Deborah lay, and drag out from the hearts of these men the terrible tragedy of their lives, taking it as a symptom of the disease of their class, no ghost Horror would terrify you more. A reality of soul-starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the besotted faces on the street,—I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life of one man: whatever muddy depth of soul-history lies beneath you can read according to the eyes God has given you. ”

“ Little Margret, sitting by the muddy road, digging her fingers dully into the clover-roots, while she looked at the spot where the wheels had passed, looked at life differently, it may be;—or old Joe Yare by the furnace-fire, his black face and gray hair bent over a torn old spelling-book Lois had given him. The night, perhaps, was going to be more to them than so many rainy hours for sleeping,—the time to be looked back on through coming lives as the hour when good and ill came to them, and they made their choice, and, as Holmes said, did abide by it. ”

“ The library, when he reached it, seemed the very heart and core of all Christmas brightness. The very cold, and the hungry solitude of the restless sea on which the window opened widely, deepened the warmth within. The room slept in a still comfort: no fire was ever so clear, no air so calm, no baby so content to be alive as this which lay on its mother's breast while she walked to and fro. Her face was paler and humbler than he had ever seen it; her husband followed her unceasingly with his eyes,—a strange sense of almost loss in them Lufflin fancied, idly.
Jacobus was very silent and still ”

“ Think that God put into this man's soul a fierce thirst for beauty,—to know it, to create it; to be—something, he knows not what,—other than he is. There are moments when a passing cloud, the sun glinting on the purple thistles, a kindly smile, a child's face, will rouse him to a passion of pain,—when his nature starts up with a mad cry of rage against God, man, whoever it is that has forced this vile, slimy life upon him. ”

“ A great warfare, I think, with a history as old as the world, and not without its pathos. It has its slain. Men and women, lean-jawed, crippled in the slow, silent battle, are in your alleys, sit beside you at your table; its martyrs sleep under every green hill-side.
You must fight in it; money will buy you no discharge from that war. There is room in it, believe me, whether your post be on a judge's bench, or over a wash-tub, for heroism, for knightly honour, for purer triumph than his who falls foremost in the breach. Your enemy, Self, goes with you from the cradle to the coffin ”