Chautauqua Institution

“ He saw the inutility of his efforts; henceforth prudence and courtly behavior put a seal upon his lips. It was the time of the great king’s omnipotence and highest splendor, the time when nobody withstood his wishes. The great Mademoiselle had just attempted to show her independence; tired of not being married, she had made up her mind to a love-match; she did not espouse Lauzun just then, the king broke off the marriage. “I will make you so great,” he said to Lauzun, “that you shall have no cause to regret what I am taking from you; meanwhile, I make you duke and peer and marshal of France.” ”

“ But there are the most delightful short tales, both in prose and in verse, that the world has ever seen, the most polished jewelry of reflection that has ever been wrought, songs of incomparable grace, comedies that must make men laugh as long as they are laughing animals, and above all, such a body of narrative fiction, old and new, prose and verse, as no other nation can show for art and for originality, for grace of workmanship in him who fashions, and for certainty of delight to him who reads.—Encyclopædia Britannica. ”

“ Penn derived the idea from the soul, and ascribed it to truth and virtue, and to God. Locke declares immortality a matter with which reason has nothing to do, and that revealed truth must be sustained by outward signs and visible acts of power; Penn saw truth by its own light, and summoned the soul to bear witness to its own glory. Locke believed “not so many men in wrong opinions as is commonly supposed, because the greatest part have no opinions at all, and do not know what they contend for;” Penn likewise vindicated the many, but it was because truth is the common inheritance of the race. ”

“ Joan rode between Dunois and the archbishop of Rheims, chancellor of France. The air resounded with the Te Deum sung with all their hearts by clergy and crowd. “In God’s name,” said Joan to Dunois, “here is a good people and a devout; when I die, I should much like it to be in these parts.” “Joan,” inquired Dunois, “know you when you will die and in what place?” “I know not,” said she, “for I am at the will of God.” Then she added, “I have accomplished that which my Lord commanded me, to raise the siege of Orleans and have the gentle king crowned. ”

“ The sea will still claim its own. The water that floats to-day in the clouds may to-morrow course through some giant tree of the forest, or be taken up in forming a beautiful crystal, or aid in the bloom and fragrance of a flower, or be taken into the lungs of some animal and deprived of the oxygen that it holds in solution, or it may be converted into steam and propel a ship or a railroad train, or it may be buried under the earth in a bed of coal and only be set free some thousands of years hence. ”

“ But we, if, like Balaam, we have allowed to evil a free range over our hearts, are sure to disobey when it comes to a question of conduct, not being restrained by the fear of miraculous punishment, which alone held him back. There is therefore no safety for us except in taking our stand at the avenues of the will, and rejecting at once every questionable impulse. And this, it is obvious, can not be done without watchfulness and self-recollection—without a continual bearing in mind where, and what we are, and that we have a treasure in our keeping, of which our foes seek to rob us. ”

“ We seem to live in the midst of a battle—there is such a din, such a hurrying to and fro. In the streets of a crowded city it is difficult to walk slowly. You feel the rushing of the crowd, and rush with it onward. In the press of our life it is difficult to be calm. In this stress of wind and tide, all professions seem to drag their anchors, and are swept out into the main. ”

“ In the universe of life, she says, man forms but a fractional part. All the sea is full of life; all the woods are full of life; all the air is full of life; on the surface of the earth man possesses, as companions or as enemies, herds and herds of living forms. Of that visible life he forms but a minute speck, and beyond that visible life there is the world invisible to common view, with its myriads of forms unseen, which the most penetrating microscope has not reached. ”

“ To Locke, “Conscience is nothing else than our own opinion of our own actions;” to Penn it is the image of God, and his oracle in the soul. Locke, who was never a father, esteemed “the duty of parents to preserve their children to not be understood without reward and punishment;” Penn loved his children, with not a thought for the consequences. Locke, who was never married, declares marriage an affair of the senses; Penn reverenced woman as the object of fervent, inward affection, made, not for lust, but for love. In studying the understanding Locke begins with the sources of knowledge ”

“ So much of the old glass has perished, and so much of the new is not even passable, that this praise may seem extravagant to those who have never seen any of the best specimens that still exist. In the choir at Canterbury there is a remnant of the best glass in England, and some good fragments remain at Westminster, but to judge of glass at its best, the student must visit La Sainte Chapelle, of Paris, or the cathedrals at Chartres, Bourges or Rheims, when effects in colors are gorgeous in their richness, brilliancy and harmony. ”

“ Think of him as interceding for his Church on the Mount of Glory, as watching them while they toil in rowing against the adverse influences which beset them round about upon the sea of life, as descending on the wings of love to their relief. Think of him as standing close by thee in thy immediate neighborhood, with a hand outstretched for thy support as soon as ever thou lookest toward him. Remember that it is not you who are to conquer, but he who is to conquer in you ”

“ We say to the biographer: “Let your subject, as far as may be, tell us of himself; give us any fragments of autobiography or journals which may be in existence; print copiously of his letters.” The wise writer of biography does so; and the most valuable portions of the life of a man of note are those in which he speaks himself. Let Michael Angelo, with candle stuck in his pasteboard cap, teach those who undertake to show us a character in whom there is a public interest; let them keep their own shadows off the canvas. ”

“ The newspaper reader, for one or another reason, regards crime as important news because he is full of morbid curiosity regarding whatever is abnormal in human conduct. A crime is something strange and fascinating because passions play through it, and secret places in human life are uncovered by it. It interests us because we are human, with strange forces of evil coming up now and again into consciousness and suggesting our brotherhood to the thief and the murderer. Many a man reads in a story of defalcation, things he has himself done without being found out. ”

“ All men who have written have subjected themselves to criticism, and criticism is desirable, provided it originates with good and honest intentions. Madame d’Staël wanted to hear it, not to read it! and if more authors and literary people would live as Goethe, as Macaulay, as Madame d’Staël, as the recent German novelist, Berthold Auerbach, in the midst of their friends or foes as they may chance to be, hearing the arguments for and against them, would they not have fewer words and paragraphs to regret at the end of their career? ”

“ This is Helen’s Tower, built by the present Earl of Dufferin as a tribute of filial affection to his mother, the late Countess of Gifford, and formally named after her on attaining his majority.
Looking across from the grey old walls of Carrickfergus, it may be seen crowning the highest hill on the Claudeboye estate. Clear cut against the sky, there it stands, lashed by the winds or touched by the sun, ever firm and enduring—a fitting memorial of one of the best and noblest of women. ”

“ Is every use of food comprised in the building up of the body? Is not some food used as the fuel of the engine is used, not to produce material, but to generate heat and motion, to burn and to be burned? The answer is as your question suggests. Some food is burned in the body, and by that means the animal fire—the calor vitalis, or vital heat, of the ancients—is kept alive. Then, say you: May not alcohol burn? We take starch, we take sugar into the body, as foods, but there are no structure of starch and sugar, only some products derived from them which show that they have been burned. ”

“ It seems to me that you fling on my unhappy and devoted head those evils, which, with far more justice, I may impute to your own turbulent, wild, and untamable dispositions—the frantic violence with which you, the magnates of Scotland, enter into feuds against each other, sticking at no cruelty to gratify your wrath, taking deep revenge for the slightest offenses, and setting at defiance those wise laws which your ancestors made for stanching of such cruelty, rebelling against the lawful authority, and bearing yourselves as if there were no king in the land ”

“ Penn esteemed happiness to be in the subjection of the baser instincts to the instinct of Deity in the breast, good and evil to be eternally and always as unlike as truth and falsehood, and the inquiry after the highest good to involve the purpose of existence. Locke says plainly that, but for rewards and punishments beyond the grave it is certainly right to eat and drink, and enjoy what we delight in; Penn, like Plato and Fénelon, maintained the doctrine so terrible to despots, that God is to be loved for his own sake, and virtue to be practiced for its intrinsic loveliness. ”

“ Humane by nature and suffering, familiar with the royal family, intimate with Sunderland and Sydney, acquainted with Russel, Halifax, Shaftesbury and Buckingham, as a member of the Royal Society, the peer of Newton, and the great scholars of his age—he valued the promptings of a free mind more than the awards of the learned, and reverenced the simple minded sincerity of the Nottingham shepherd more than the authority of colleges and the wisdom of philosophers. ”

“ It became evident, even in the first generation of the Republic, that a new people had been raised up—almost as Roderick Dhu’s men sprang from the brake—to subjugate a continent and to create sovereign states out of the rudiments of empire which yet lay plastic and warm in the wilderness. ”

“ The whole mind of the greatest personages, his favorites at the head, was set upon devising means of pleasing the king; Madame de Montespan had pictures painted in miniature of all the towns he had taken in Holland; they were made into a book which was worth four thousand pistoles, and of which Racine and Boileau wrote the text; people of tact, like M. de Langlée, paid court to the master through those whom he loved.
All the style of living at court was in accordance with the magnificence of the king and his courtiers; Colbert was beside himself at the sums the queen lavished on play. ”

“ The soul will then possibly be scared by terrors, as the disciples in the boat were scared with the thoughts of a phantom, and will tremble in apprehension of being thrust out from the frail bark of the body into the darkness, uncertainty, insecurity of the new and untried element. ”

“ We are conveyed to Edinburgh, then as now, the most picturesque city of Europe; we see the intrigues of the court; we witness a melée in the streets between the Leslies and the Seytons, and it is not until we are half through the volume that we are introduced to Queen Mary, the Captive, about whom the whole interest of the story gathers. We see her in an island fortress of the Douglas, confronting with haughty eloquence the stern Melville, Ruthven and Lindsey, sent by the regent to obtain her signature to renounce all right to the throne of Scotland. ”

“ Among the gentlemen in the colony on James river there were those of better culture and higher position, but none equaled, in intrepid courage, force of character and practical wisdom, Captain John Smith. There were none who contributed so much to the success of the enterprise. He had been, from his early life, an adventurer, inured to hardships, and fearless in danger. He returned to England from the war with the Turks, in which he became distinguished for prowess and valor, in time to join the colonists, and was appointed by King James a member of the council. ”

“ Possessing an extraordinary greatness of mind, vast conceptions, remarkable for their universality and precision, and surpassing in speculative endowments, conversant with men, with books, and governments, with various languages, and the forms of political combinations as they existed in England and France, in Holland, and the principalities and free cities of Germany, he yet sought the source of wisdom in his own soul. ”

“ In computing the influence of wine, men have no longer to discuss anything more than the influence of a definite chemical compound, one of a family of chemical compounds called the alcohols—the second of a family group, differing in origin from the first of the series, which is got from wood, in that it is got from grain, and is called ethylic, or common alcohol, pure spirit of wine. But now the world turns properly to ask another question. Admitted all that is said, why, after all, should the practice of mankind in the use of this spirit be bad? Man is not guided solely by reason ”

“ The simple truth is that negligent mothers are more guilty than the schools. It is a mother’s business to know all about her children—to know when they are overworked—and it is also the mother’s duty to put a stop to hurtful work. We do not hire teachers to take the place of parents. We could not afford to pay enough teachers for this service. The public school system assumes that mothers attend to their duties, and retain their authority. If school work is hurtful to a young girl, the mother has the right to remove the child from the school. ”

“ There is no measuring accurately how far ambition, personal interest, a king’s egotism had to do with Henry IV.’s abjuration of his religion; none would deny that those human infirmities were present; but all this does not prevent the conviction that patriotism was uppermost in Henry’s soul, and that the idea of his duty as king toward France, a prey to all the evils of civil and foreign war, was the determining motive of his resolution. ”

“ The remedy is difficult because the public has to cure itself—the newspaper can not cure it—of the desire to know “the evil that is in the world through lust.” The world, the flesh and the devil take up a commanding position in our anxieties, solicitudes, curiosities, and sympathies. We must be a great deal better as a people before we shall be content to live in ignorance of any badness which breaks through the calm surface of life and rises into a billow of crime. ”

“ They doubtless have many purposes, that in our dim knowledge we do not see, but they serve at least one important end; they are carbon makers, and without carbon no plant can grow, and without the plant what would become of the animal? So, to a certain extent our lives depend on the things which ofttimes only seem to annoy us. We are so ground in the mills of God, so built, linked and woven, so dependent and so cared for by the power that is in us, that the microscope can see nothing too small, that does not concern us in its use and sphere of action ”

“ In private, chattering, frisking, fluttering around them, at one time perched on the arm of one or the other’s chairs, at another playfully sitting on their knee, she would throw herself upon their necks, embrace them, kiss them, fondle them, pull them to pieces, chuck them under the chin, tease them, rummage their tables, their papers, their letters, reading them sometimes against their will, according as she saw that they were in the humor to laugh at it, and occasionally speaking thereon. ”