Fanny Kemble

“ The lights of heaven shine more glowingly here than through the misty veils that curtain our islands. The moon and stars are wonderfully bright, and there is an intensity, an earnestness, and a translucent purity in the sky here that delights me.... Four months are already gone out of the two years we are to pass out of England. Dear England! My heart dwells with affectionate pride upon the beauty and greatness and goodness of my own country—that wonderful little land, that mere morsel of earth as it seems on the map—so full of power, of wealth, of intellectual vigor and moral worth!... ”

“ With my scheme of going to America, I think I can look the future courageously in the face. It is something to hold one's fortune in one's own hands; if the worst comes to the worst it is but another year's drudgery, and the whereabouts really matters little.... We hear that the cholera is in Edinburgh. I cannot help thinking with the deepest anxiety of those I love there, and I imagine with sorrow that beautiful, noble city, those breezy hills, those fresh, sea-weedy shores and coasts breathed upon by that dire pestilence. ”

“ The colors of a patch of purple heather, broken banks by roadsides through which sunshine streamed—often mere effects of light and shade—return to me again and again like tunes, and to shut my eyes and look at them is a perfect delight to me. I suppose one is in some way the better as well as the happier for one's sympathy with the fair things of this fair world, which are types of things yet fairer, and emanations from the great Source of all goodness, loveliness, and sublimity. Whether in the moral or material universe, images and ideas of beauty must always be in themselves good. ”

“ New York, Tuesday, October 15, 1833.
You are wandering, dear Mrs. Jameson, in the land of romance, the birthplace of wild traditions, the stronghold of chivalrous legends, the spell-land of witchcraft, the especial haunt and home of goblin, specter, sprite, and gnome; all the beautiful and fanciful creations of the poetical imagination of the Middle Ages. You are, I suppose, in Germany; intellectually speaking, almost the antipodes of America. Germany is now the country to which my imagination wanders oftener than to any other. ”

“ I think you will be pleased with Bianca. I was surprised when I came to act it at finding how terribly it affected me, for I am not naturally at all jealous, and in this play, while feigning to be so, it seemed to me that it must be really the most horrible suffering conceivable; I am almost sorry that I can imagine it well enough to represent it well.
You say that we love intellect, but I do not agree with you; I do not think intellect excites love. I do not even think that it increases our love for those we do love, though it adds admiration to our affection. ”

“ Instead of depressing my spirits, it always raises them; it seems to me as if the vast power of the great element communicated itself to me. I feel strong, as I run by the side of the big waves, with something of their strength, and the same species of wild excitement which thunder and lightning produce in me always affects me by the sea-shore. I never saw the sea but once violently agitated, and then I was so well pleased with its appearance that I took a boat and went out into the bustle, singing with all my might, which was the only vent I could find for my high spirits ”

“ It is not for me to praise those whom all English-speaking folk delight to honor; but in thinking of that bright band of very noble young spirits, of my brother's love and admiration for them, of their affection for him, of our pleasant intercourse in those far-off early days,—in spite of the faithful, life-long regard which still subsists between myself and the few survivors of that goodly company, my heart sinks with a heavy sense of loss, and the world from which so much light has departed seems dark and dismal enough. ”

“ I believe the pleasure and delight I take in the music, the lights, the wreaths, and mirrors of a splendid ball-room, and the love I have for the smooth lawns, bright waters, and lordly oaks of a fine domain, would disgracefully influence my impressions of the people I met amongst them. Still, I humbly trust I do not like any of my friends, fine or coarse, only for their belongings, though my intercourse with the first gratifies my love of luxury and excites what my Edinburgh friends call my ideality. ”

“ To be a good politician one ought to have, as it were, only one eye for truth; I do not at all mean to be single-eyed in the good sense of the word, but to be incapable of seeing more than one side of every question: one sees a part so much more strongly when one does not see the whole of a matter, and though a statesman may need a hundred eyes, I maintain that a party politician is the better for having only one. Restricted vision is good for work, too; people who see far and wide can seldom be very hopeful, I should think, and hope is the very essence of working courage. ”

“ This again lasts, as it were, but a day; the sun presently becomes so powerful that the world withers away under the intense heat, the flowers and shrubs fade, and instead of screening and refreshing the earth, are themselves scorched and parched with the glaring fierceness of the sky; the ground cracks, the watercourses dry up, the rivers shrink in their beds, and every human creature that can flies from the lowlands and the cities to go up into the north or to the mountains to find breath, shelter, and refreshment from the sultry curse. ”

“ You speak of my love of nature almost as if it were a quality for which I deserve commendation. It is a blessing for which I am most grateful. You who live uninclosed by paved streets and brick walls, who have earth, sea, and sky à discrétion spread round you in all their majestic beauty, cannot imagine how vividly my memory recalls and my mind dwells upon mere strips of greensward, with the shadows of trees lying upon them. ”

“ In the afternoon, I found my mother deep in her French novel, from which she read me two very striking passages—the description of Esmeralda, which was like a fine painting, and extremely beautiful, and the sketch of Quasimodo's life, ending with his riding on the great bell of the cathedral. Very powerful and very insane—a sort of mental nightmare, giving one as much the idea of disorder of intellect as such an image occurring to one in a dream would of a disordered stomach. Harmony, order, the beauty of goodness and the justice of God, are alike ignored in such works. ”

“ I do not fear that my imagination will become over-excited with thoughts such as these, but I often regret most bitterly that my heart is not more deeply touched by them. Your definition of the love of God seemed almost like a reproach to my conscience. How miserably our practice halts behind our knowledge of good, even when tried at the bar of our own lenient judgment, and by our imperfect standard of right! how poorly does our life answer to our profession! ”

“ We do these things and die; we ride upon the air and water, we guide the lightning and we bridle the sea, we borrow the swiftness of the wind and the fine subtlety of the fire; we lord it in this universe of ours for a day, and then our bodies are devoured by these material slaves we have controlled, and helplessly mingle their dust with the elements that have obeyed our will, who reabsorb the garment of our soul when that has fled—whither? ”

“ The spring does not stand coaxing and beckoning the shy summer to the woods and fields as in our country, but while winter yet seems lord of the [569] ascendant, and his white robes are still covering land and water, suddenly the summer looks down upon the earth from the cloudless sky, and, as by magic, the ice melts, the snow evaporates, the trees are clothed with green, the woods are full of flowers, and the whole world breaks out into a hallelujah of warmth, beauty, and blossoming like mid-July in our deliberate climate. ”

“ It is not the beauty of nature alone, as it appeals merely to our senses, that produces that passionate love for it which induces us to prefer communion with it to the intercourse of our fellows. The elevated trains of thought, and the profound and sublime aspirations which the external beauty of the world suggests, draw and rivet our mind and soul to its contemplation, and produce a sort of awful sense of companionship with the Unseen, which cannot, I think, be an experience of early youth. ”

“ How the later artists lost the simple secret of earnest vigor of their predecessors, while gaining in everything that was not that! Grace, finish, refinement, accuracy of drawing, richness of coloring, all that merely tended towards perfection and execution, while the simplicity and single-heartedness of conception died away more and more. All art seems by degrees to outgrow its strength, and certainly in painting the archaic cradle touches one's imagination as neither the graceful youth nor mature manhood do. ”

“ America has no gray abbeys, no ruined cloisters, to tell of monastic brotherhoods—the preserves of ancient historic chronicles, the guardians of the early wells and springs of classic learning and genius. In America there are no great, old, time-stained, weather-beaten, ivy-mantled churches full of tombs, such as we saw to-day, with curious carvings and quaint effigies, and where the early rulers of the land embraced the faith and received the baptism of Christ. That must be a very strange country. But they have Plymouth Rock, on the shore where the Protestant Pilgrims landed. ”

“ Without any home but my father's house, without means of subsistence but the small pittance which he was able to give her, in most grateful acknowledgment of her unremitting care of us, without any joys or hopes but those of others, without pleasure in the present or expectation in the future, apparently without memory of the past, she spent her whole life in the service of my parents and their children, and lived and moved and had her being in a serene, unclouded, unvarying atmosphere of cheerful, self-forgetful content that was heroic in its absolute unconsciousness. ”

“ Jameson,
Thank you for your money; it is necessary to be arithmetical if one means to be economical, and I receive your tribute with more pleasure than that of a duchess. I sometimes hear people lament that they have anything to do with money. I do not at all share that feeling; money, after all, only represents other things. If one has much, it is always well to look to one's expenditure, or the much will become much less; and if one has little, and works hard for it, I cannot understand being above receiving the price of one's labor. ”

“ One can imagine the merchant's daughter growing up to the possession of her great wealth, through the narrowing and hardening influences of sordid circumstances and habits of careful calculation and rigid economy, thrifty, prudent, just, and eminently conscientious; of Portia one can only think as of a creature born in the very lap of luxury and nursed in the midst of sunny magnificence, whose very element was elegant opulence and refined splendor, and by whose cradle Fortune herself stood godmother. ”

“ I make every exertion that duty and affection can prompt; but, you know, it is my nature rather to absorb the sorrow of others than to assist them in throwing it off; and when one's own heart is all but frozen, one knows not where to find warmth to impart to those who are shivering with misery beside one.... I have left myself scarcely any room to tell you of my present life. I work very hard, rehearsing every morning and acting every night, and spending the intervening time in long farewell rides round this most beautiful and beloved Edinburgh. ”