Chautauqua Institution

“ The secret of thrift, I say, is knowledge. The more you know, the more you can save yourself and that which belongs to you; and can do more work with less effort.
A knowledge of the laws of commercial credit, we all know, saves capital, enabling a less capital to do the work of a greater. Knowledge of the electric telegraph saves time; knowledge of writing saves human speech and locomotion; knowledge of domestic economy saves income; knowledge of sanitary laws saves health and life; knowledge of the laws of the intellect saves wear and tear of brain ”

“ Not much time had our tourists, however, for puzzling their brains or harrowing their souls over the questions of human destiny, for their heads were filled with all sorts of associations with men and books, and they sometimes went wandering to and fro, to find the very houses where their favorite authors lived, the spots where events of interest had transpired, the places made immortal by their poets’ pens. They must have their visit to the Tower, long days in the Museum and the art galleries, for had they not, each and all, in one form or another, the genuine Kensington craze? ”

“ The very air that hangs, heavy and still with the fog-damps, above the great cross there on the old clock tower, is not stiller than the ground beneath one’s feet. The hundreds of thousands of people that composed the human throng are gone, as if the earth had opened and swallowed them. The merchants are in their homes at the West End, the clerks in their humble homes in the suburbs. ”

“ Whether it lies in the race, in the soil, in the free political constitution, or in the healthy tone of education,—certainly, the English in general appear to have certain advantages over many others. Here in Weimar, we see only a few of them, and, probably, by no means the best; but what fine, handsome people they are. And however young they come here, they feel themselves by no means strange or embarrassed in this foreign atmosphere; on the contrary, their deportment in society is as full of confidence, and as easy as if they were lords everywhere, and the whole world belonged to them. ”

“ And to do that wisely and well, they must be more or less women of business; and to be women of business, they must know something of the meaning of the words capital, profit, price, value, labor, wages, and of the relations between those two last. In a word, they must know a little political economy. Nay, I sometimes think that the mistress of every household might find, not only thrift of money, but thrift of brain; freedom from mistakes, anxieties, worries of many kinds, all of which eat out the health as well as the heart, by a little sound knowledge of the principles of political economy. ”

“ Though Oberon fixed the ass’s head on very gently, it awakened him, and rising up, unconscious of what Oberon had done to him, he went toward the bower where the fairy queen slept.
“Ah! what angel is that I see!” said Titania, opening her eyes, and the juice of the little purple flower beginning to take effect: “are you as wise as you are beautiful?” “Why, mistress,” said the clown, “if I have wit enough to find the way out of this wood, I have enough to serve my turn.”
“Out of the wood do not desire to go,” said the enamored queen. “I am a spirit of no common rate. I love you. ”

“ See, Camillo, would you not think it breathed? Her eye seems to have motion in it.” “I must draw the curtain, my liege,” said Paulina. “You are so transported, you will persuade yourself the statue lives.” “O, sweet Paulina,” said Leontes, “make me think so twenty years together! Still methinks there is an air comes from her. What fine chisel could ever yet cut breath? Let no man mock me, for I will kiss her.” “Good my lord, forbear!” said Paulina. “The ruddiness upon her lip is wet; you will stain your own with oily painting. ”

“ If when your natural appetite for food is satisfied, and your enjoyment and relish of it have ceased, you have rich and high flavored dishes set before you, the high-flavors will then still prove agreeable to the palate, and act upon it as a sort of excitement, and the natural appetite will have its work superseded by a false and artificial one, and you will go on eating under this temptation, until your stomach is over-crammed. All the so-called luxuries of cooking are merely devices to make men eat more, who have already eaten enough. ”

“ Amid all our national vicissitudes and struggles, defending the flag from foes without and within, cutting down the forests to make farms for cultivation, and clearing up the waste places to make them habitable, we have never lost our educational enterprise. In the far West, as well as in Maine and Massachusetts, you meet it. Not to be wondered at, either, is this in a people who had the courage and faith to launch such a governmental scheme as is ours. Indeed, it required little discernment to see that popular institutions could be served by no other handmaid than popular education. ”

“ There is now no branch of outdoor education of greater importance than that of an ability to “handle the ribbons.” Not a man or woman but would be ashamed to say that they were incompetent, if in fair health and strength, to pilot their own carriage. And yet, though so large a proportion of society can boast a smattering of the science, there is no pursuit in which perfection is proportionately so rarely attained.
The first requisite for a tyro is to learn to sit well, and so to acquire the proper scope for his own power over his horse. ”

“ Novels will be read: but that is all the more reason why women should be trained, by the perusal of a higher, broader, deeper literature, to distinguish the good novel from the bad, the moral from the immoral, the noble from the base, the true work of art from the sham which hides its shallowness and vulgarity under a tangled plot and melodramatic situations. She should learn—and that she can only learn by cultivation—to discern with joy, and drink in with reverence, the good, the beautiful, and the true ”

“ Now, it has occurred to me, when I recollect, that we love our children, and call them our second selves, merely because we have begotten them, that there is another kind of progeny springing from us, not less worthy of our esteem; for what we engender by the mind, the offspring of our understanding, diligence, and genius, emanates from nobler parts of us than what springs from the body, and is much more our own. ”

“ To make him see that not by blare of trumpets, not by noise, wrath, greed, ambition, intrigue, puffery, is good and lasting work to be done on earth: but by wise self-distrust, by silent labor, by lofty self-control, by that charity which hopeth all things, believeth all things, endureth all things; by such an example, in short, as women now in tens of thousands set to those around them; such as they will show more and more, the more their whole womanhood is educated to employ its powers without waste and without haste in harmonious unity. ”

“ The kitchen is the German woman’s pride, and no wonder, with its shining rows of brass and copper kettles and cooking utensils, hanging so orderly against the gray wall, and the white porcelain oven, brass-doored and brass-knobbed. Does it surprise you that she likes to take a seat there every morning and talk over the menu for the day with Frederika, then unlock the pantry door and survey the clean shelves, all dressed up in perforated paper, or red leather and brass tacks, and loaded with groceries and confectioneries. ”

“ As space could not be commanded on the ground, the magnificent buildings required for business that manipulates the wealth of the world have had to occupy the air. Business houses stand side by side with the dark low buildings of the seventeenth century; and he who has time to penetrate some of the picturesque old mansions now used as counting-rooms, will be repaid by a sight of much that is architecturally quaint and fine. No part of London is better worth exploring than this. ”

“ Now, in this section of the rocks which we have as they are stratified, formed in layers one above the other, we come to the idea of time. I was going along this morning, with a basket and one of these stones in my hand, and a man’s attention was attracted, and he asked how long since those animals were alive. I said a million of years. He looked rather astonished, and expressed himself that I could not know. The idea of such great amounts of time strikes any one like the vast areas of space. At the first step in geology we have got to expand our notions of time. ”

“ And while our common schools are thus moving onward, it is no less a sign of national devotion to education that schools of higher grades are springing up everywhere. Special and charitable schools for the deaf and dumb, for the weak-minded, industrial training schools, etc., all of them upheld by the same national spirit. Nor to be forgotten are the schools for all classes at home, where by correspondence and concert of work, results which none can measure are attained. ”

“ The rural population may be regarded as a magazine, from which the forces of declining mankind are always recruited and refreshed. But just go into our great towns, and you will feel quite differently. Just take a turn by the side of a second diable boiteux, or a physician with a large practice, and he will whisper to you tales which will horrify you at the misery, and astonish you at the vice with which human nature is visited, and from which society suffers. ”

“ Cooking is, indeed, properly the first stage of digestion; it is an art which the intelligence of man has taught him, in order that food may be made to go as far as possible in furnishing nourishment to living frames. By good cooking, hosts of things are converted into excellent nourishment, which would be entirely unmanageable by the stomach without such assistance. The art of cookery ought, however, never to be carried further than this. It should not strive to make men eat more than their bodies want, by furnishing the temptation of delicious flavors. ”

“ You know that some of your lean neighbors cast envious eyes towards you in severe winter weather, and have chattering teeth and goose’s skins, when you are quite free from such tokens of chilliness. But you will nevertheless be surprised when I tell you what a really fiery piece of business this warming by fat is. Your fat is a store of fuel, which you are going to burn to heat your body, exactly as you burn coal in the grate to heat your room in the winter. It is oil laid by, to be consumed gradually, as a sort of liquid coal, in the furnace of the living machine. ”

“ A capitalist, a commercialist, an employer of labor, and an accountant—every mistress of a household is all these, whether she likes it or not; and it would be surely well for her, in so very complicated a state of society as this, not to trust merely to that mother-wit, that intuitive sagacity and innate power of ruling her fellow-creatures, which carries women so nobly through their work in simpler and less civilized societies.
And here I stop to answer those who may say—as I have heard it said—that a woman’s intellect is not fit for business ”

“ But, beside this thrift in clothing, I am not alone, I believe, in wishing for some thrift in the energy which produces it. Labor misapplied, you will agree, is labor wasted; and as dress, I presume, is intended to adorn the person of the wearer, the making a dress which only disfigures her may be considered as a plain case of waste. It would be impertinent in me to go into any details: but it is impossible to walk about the streets now without passing young people who must be under a deep delusion as to the success of their own toilette. ”

“ When I have seen widows, having the care of children, of a great household, of great estate, of a great business, struggling heroically, and yet often mistakenly; blamed severely for selfishness and ambition, while they were really sacrificing themselves with the divine instinct of a mother for their children’s interest: I have stood by with mingled admiration and pity, and said to myself—“How nobly she is doing the work without teaching! ”

“ Some busy-brained statistician has amused himself by treating the place as if it were a great living monster, whose gigantic throat swallows yearly over nine millions of once living creatures, either fish, flesh or fowl, washed down by fifty millions of gallons of ale and wine. ”

“ There are fairer palaces in London than those of her princes, and to these, her edifices devoted to the alleviation of human suffering and the advancement of human progress, we turn with never-tiring interest and zeal. In this class stand her colleges and hospitals and asylums, her charitable organizations of every sort. London gives yearly in food and clothing, and in the relief of disease, over thirteen millions of dollars, to say nothing of a million more given privately by individuals. ”