Elbert Hubbard

“ I want no better clothing, no better food, no more comforts and conveniences than my helpers and fellow-workers have. I would be ashamed to monopolize a luxury—to take a beautiful work of art, say a painting or a marble statue, and keep it for my own pleasure and for the select few I might invite to see my beautiful things. Art is for all—beauty is for all. Harmony in all of its manifold forms should be like a sunset—free to all who can drink it in. The Roycroft Shop is for The Roycrofters, and each is limited only by his capacity to absorb. ”

“ WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Some one has told us that Heaven is not a place but a condition of mind, and it is possible that he is right.
But if Heaven is a place, surely it is not unlike Grasmere. Such loveliness of landscape—such sylvan stretches of crystal water—peace and quiet and rest!
Great, green hills lift their heads to the skies, and all the old stone walls and hedgerows are covered with trailing vines and blooming flowers. The air is rich with song of birds, sweet with perfume, and the blossoms gaily shower their petals on the passer-by. ”

“ What edifice can equal thought? Babel is less lofty than Isaiah; Cheops is smaller than Homer; the Colosseum is inferior to Juvenal; the Giralda of Seville is dwarfish by the side of Cervantes; Saint Peter's of Rome does not reach to the ankle of Dante.
What architect has the skill to build a tower so high as the name of Shakespeare? Add anything if you can to mind! Then why a monument to Shakespeare?
I answer, not for the glory of Shakespeare, but for the honor of England!
THOMAS A. EDISON
The mind can not conceive what man will do in the
Twentieth Century with his chained lightning. ”

“ In Ireland there are no forests, but in the peat-bogs are found remains of mighty trees that once lifted their outstretched branches to the sun. Are these remains of stately forests symbols of a race of men that, too, have passed away?
In any wayside village of Leinster you can pick you a model for an Apollo. He is in rags, is this giant, and can not read, but he can dance and sing and fight. He has an eye for color, an ear for music, a taste for rhyme, a love of novelty and a thirst for fun. ”

“ Genius is a great fund of joyousness.
Each and all of these men influenced the world profoundly. We are different people because they lived. Every house, school, library and workshop in Christendom is touched by their presence.
All are dead but Edison, yet their influence can never die. And no one in the list has influenced civilization so profoundly as Edison. You can not look out of a window in any city in Europe or America without beholding the influence of his thought. You may say that the science of electricity has gone past him, but all the Sons of Jove have built on him. ”

“ And the greatness of genius still rests upon Chelsea. As we walk slowly through its winding ways, by the edge of its troubled waters, among dark and crooked turns, through curious courts, by old gateways and piles of steepled stone, where flocks of pigeons wheel, and bells chime, and organs peal, and winds sigh, we know that all has been sanctified by their presence. And their spirits abide with us, and the splendid beauty of their visions is about us. For the stones beneath our feet have been hallowed by their tread, and the walls have borne their shadows ”

“ Shakespeare hated dogs, but spoke forty-eight times in his plays in terms of respect and affection for a horse. Who would not resent the imputation that one's face was like that of a sheep or a goat or an ox, and much gore has been shed because men have referred to other men as asses—but a horse! God bless you, yes!
No one has ever accused George Eliot of being handsome, but this portrait tells of a woman of fifty: calm, gentle, and the strong features speak of a soul in which to confide.
At Highgate, by the side of the grave of Lewes, rests the dust of this great and loving woman. ”

“ Turner's temperament was audacious, self-centered, self-reliant, eager for success and fame, yet at the same time scorning public opinion—a paradox often found in the artistic mind of the first class; silent always—with a bitter silence, disdaining to tell his meaning when the critics could not perceive it.
He was above all things always the artist, never the realist. The realist pictures the things he sees; the artist expresses that which he feels. Children, and all simple folk who use pen, pencil or brush, describe the things they behold. ”

“ There is no lodge-keeper, no flowerbeds laid out with square and compass, no trees trimmed to appear like elephants, no cast-iron dogs, nor terra-cotta deer, and, strangest of all, no sign of the lawn-mower. There is nothing, in fact, to give forth a sign that the great Apostle of Beauty lives in this very old-fashioned spot. Big boulders are to be seen here and there where Nature left them, tangles of vines running over old stumps, part of the meadow cut close with a scythe, and part growing up as if the owner knew the price of hay. ”

“ When the visitor is conducted to the crypt of the Pantheon, he is first taken to the tomb of Victor Hugo. The sarcophagus on each side is draped with the red, white and blue of France and the stars and stripes of America. With uncovered heads, we behold the mass of flowers and wreaths, and our minds go back to Eighteen Hundred Eighty-five, when the body of the chief citizen of Paris lay in state at the Pantheon and five hundred thousand people passed by and laid the tribute of silence or of tears on his bier. ”

“ The North Wind of hate, the Simoon of Jealousy, the Cyclone of Passion beat and buffet him. Pilots strong and pilots cowardly stand at the helm by turn. But sometimes the South Wind softly blows, the sun comes out by day, the stars at night: friendship holds the rudder firm, and love makes all secure.
Such is the life of man—a voyage on life's unresting sea; but Dickens knows it not. Esther is always good, Fagin is always bad, Bumble is always pompous, and Scrooge is always—Scrooge. At no Dickens' party do you ever mistake Cheeryble for Carker ”

“ We thus see why to many Browning is only a joke, Whitman an eccentric, Dante insane and Turner a pretender. These have all sought to express things which the many can not feel, and consequently they have been, and are, the butt of jokes and jibes innumerable. "Except ye become as little children," etc.—and yet the scoffers are often people of worth. Nothing so shows the limitation of humanity as this: genius often does not appreciate genius. The inspired, strangely enough, are like the fools, they do not recognize inspiration. ”

“ And I might here say as Philip Gilbert Hamerton said of Turner, "He was lamentably unfortunate in this: throughout his whole life he never came under the ennobling and refining influence of a good woman."
It requires two to make a home. The first home was made when a woman, cradling in her loving arms a baby, crooned a lullaby. All the tender sentimentality we throw around a place is the result of the sacred thought that we live there with some one else. It is "our" home. The home is a tryst—the place where we retire and shut the world out. ”

“ He lived well. He gambled a little, and as the cards did not run his way he got into debt. So he wrote to his agent in Lissoy to raise the rents. He did so, threatened, applied the screws, and—the inhabitants packed up and let the landlord have his village all to himself. Let Goldsmith tell:
"Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn:
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen,
And desolation saddens all thy green;
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain. ”

“ Men like Victor Hugo can be killed or they may be banished, but they can not be bought; neither can they be intimidated into silence. He resigned his pension and boldly expressed himself in his own way.
He knew history by heart and toyed with it; politics was his delight. But it is a mistake to call him a statesman. He was bold to rashness, impulsive, impatient and vehement. Because a man is great is no reason why he should be proclaimed perfect. Such men as Victor Hugo need no veneer—the truth will answer: he would explode a keg of powder to kill a fly. ”

“ His work is masculine, as the sun is masculine; for the Prophetic Voice is as surely masculine as the lullaby and lyric cry are feminine.
Whitman brings the warmth of the sun to the buds of the heart, so that they open and bring forth form, color, perfume. He becomes for them aliment and dew; so these buds become blossoms, fruits, tall branches and stately trees that cast refreshing shadows.
There are men who are to other men as the shadow of a mighty rock in a weary land—such is Walt Whitman.
VICTOR HUGO
Man is neither master of his life nor of his fate. ”

“ The face is that of a man who has borne burdens and known sorrow, of one who has overcome only after mighty effort. I was going to say that Edison looks like a Roman Emperor, but I recall that no Roman Emperor deserves to rank with him—not even Julius Cæsar! The face is that of Napoleon at Saint Helena, unsubdued.
The predominant characteristics of the man are his faith, hope, good-cheer and courage. But at all times his humor is apt to be near the surface.
Had Edison been as keen a businessman as Rockefeller, and kept his own in his own hands, he would today be as rich as Rockefeller. ”

“ Ireland has five million inhabitants; once it had eight. Three millions have gone away, and when one thinks of landlordism he wonders why the five millions did not go, too. But the Irish are a poetic people and love the land of their fathers with a childlike love, and their hearts are all bound up in sweet memories, rooted by song and legend into nooks and curious corners, so the tendrils of affection hold them fast. ”

“ No one will question that Shakespeare's is the greatest name in English literature; and among writers living or dead, in England or out of it, no woman has ever shown us power equal to that of George Eliot, in the subtle clairvoyance which divines the inmost play of passions, the experience that shows human capacity for contradiction, and the indulgence that is merciful because it understands. ”

“ Here is a man who, if he should err deeply, is yet so great that, like Cotton Mather, he might not hesitate to stand uncovered on the street-corners and ask the forgiveness of mankind. Such men are saved by their enemies. Their own good and the good of humanity require that their balance of power shall not be too great. Had the North gone down, Gladstone might never have seen his mistake. ”

“ Whitman sings the beauty and the glory of the present. He rebukes our groans and sighs—bids us look about on every side at the wonders of creation, and at the miracles within our grasp. He lifts us up, restores us to our own, introduces us to man and to Nature, and thus infuses into us courage, manly pride, self-reliance, and the strong faith that comes when we feel our kinship with God. ”

“ Said Heinrich Heine, prone on his bed in Paris: "The wittiest sarcasms of mortals are only an attempt at jesting when compared with those of the great Author of the Universe—the Aristophanes of Heaven!"
Wise men over and over have wasted good ink and paper in bewailing Swift's malice and coarseness. But without these very elements which the wise men bemoan, Swift would be for us a cipher. Yet love is life and hate is death, so how can spite benefit? ”

“ At the top of the house and built on its flat roof is the most interesting apartment of Hauteville House—the study and workroom of Victor Hugo. Three of its sides and the roof are of glass. The floor, too, is one immense slab of sea-green glass. Sliding curtains worked by pulleys cut off the light as desired. "More light, more light," said the great man again and again. He gloried and reveled in the sunshine.
Here, in the Winter, with no warmth but the sun's rays, his eyes shaded by his felt hat, he wrote, always standing at a shelf fixed in the wall. ”

“ Wordsworth's service to humanity consists in the fact that he has shown us old truth in a new light, and has made plain the close relationship that exists between physical nature and the soul of man. Is this much or little? I think it is much. When we realize that we are a part of all that we see, or hear, or feel, we are not lonely. But to feel a sense of separation is to feel the chill of death.
Wordsworth taught that the earth is the universal Mother and that the life of the flower has its source in the same universal life from whence ours is derived. ”