“ Like the fortifications of Paris, it is designed not so much to defend as to control the city.
St. Petersburg is certainly the most imposing city, and Russia is the most imposing nation in the world—at first sight. But the imposing aspect of both is to a great extent an imposition. The city tries to pass itself off for granite, when a great proportion is of wood or brick, covered with paint and stucco, which peels off in masses before the frosts of every winter, and needs a whole army of plasterers and painters every spring to put it in presentable order. ”

“ Captain Starkey, not to throw away the chance he spoke of, had gone out to the end of the bowsprit, having first let the jib and foresail go by the run, and was for a brief space safe from the flames; but what was this but a prolongation of the bitterness of death?
The boats continued to increase the distance between them and the blazing ship, amidst a dead silence broken only by the measured dip of the oars; and many an eye was turned with intense anxiety shoreward with the hope of descrying the expected pilot. ”

“ Leslie, pardon me if I take a liberty not warranted by our acquaintance. Against the lady I say nothing. Indeed, I have heard some things which appear to entitle her to compassion and respect. But as to Peschiera, all who prize honor, suspect him to be a knave—I know him to be one. Now, I think that the longer we preserve that abhorrence for knavery which is the generous instinct of youth, why, the fairer will be our manhood, and the more reverend our age. You agree with me?” And Harley suddenly turning, his eyes fell like a flood of light upon Randal's pale and secret countenance. ”

“ If, as we know to be the case, men are led by the force of example to the commission of suicide, why not of any other species of crime? If a fashion may spring up, and prevail for a time, of leaping headlong from the top of a monument or the parapet of a bridge through the publicity given to such acts by means of the press, how shall the exploits of the felon or the assassin escape imitation when made the subjects of a far more extensive and pertinacious publicity, and paraded as they are before the world with all the importance they can be made to assume? ”

“ So a courtier, having planned from his youth his career of ambition, struggles up the ladder, lubric and precipitous, to the top—to the very consummation of his hopes, and then falls back into the rubbish from which he has issued; and they who envied his fortune, now rejoice in his fall. What lessons of philosophy in a greasy pole! What moral reflections in a spectacle so empty to the common world! What wholesome sermons are here upon the vanity of human hopes, the disappointments of ambition, and the difficulties of success in the slippery paths of fortune and human greatness! ”

“ In feverish recollection of the period of his youth, it appeared to him as if the mask with his features raised itself up in the charnel-house—at length, through the superstition which, on the new year's night, beholds spirits and futurity, it grew to a living youth in the position of the beautiful boy of the capitol, pulling out a thorn; and his former blooming figure was bitterly placed as a phantasma before him.
“He could behold it no longer, he covered his eyes. A thousand hot, draining tears streamed into the snow. ”

“ They are probably on the flat roof of some neighboring house; but the kites are not the less interesting on account of their origin being unknown. What a host of anxious faces are turned up to the sky! Some take a liking to the red at first sight, while others feel attracted by a mysterious sympathy to the green. Bets are freely offered and accepted, either in sweetmeats or money; and the crowd, condensing, move to and fro in a huge wave, from which their eager voices arise like the continuous roaring of the sea. Higher and higher go the kites. ”

“ The trees in summer put on their verdure; they blossom; their fruit ripens—falls; what the roots gathered up out of the earth returns to earth again; the leaves drop one by one, and decay, resolving themselves into new forms, to enter into other organizations; the sap flows back to the trunk; and the forest, wood, field, and brake compose themselves to their annual winter's sleep. In spring and summer the birds sang in the boughs, and tended their young brood; the whole animal kingdom rejoiced in their full bounding life; the sun shone warm, and nature rejoiced in greenness. ”

“ The armies of Liberty only await the capture of Toulon to sever the chains of Italy. I am terminating a secret journey of observation through Piedmont and the Milanese. Come with me to Paris, and join the standard of Freedom. In France, no parchment barrier excludes untitled youth from fame and fortune; draw a blade in her cause, and relieve the place of your nativity from the thralldom of its petty tyrant. These brutal and stolid Austrians must be driven to their land of hereditary bondage—justice demands it. The time has gone by for insulted and injured Humanity to shed tears in secret. ”

“ Nor, if he could have fallen in love, was Violante the one to attract that sullen, secret heart; her instinctive nobleness, the very stateliness of her beauty, womanlike though it was, awed him. Men of that kind may love some soft slave—they can not lift their eyes to a queen. They may look down—they can not look up. But, on the one hand, Randal could not resign altogether the chance of securing a fortune that would realize his most dazzling dreams, upon the mere assurance, however probable, which had so dismayed him ”

“ I never gazed on the thick, rich woods, or heard the wood-pigeon's cooing across the waters at the hushed evening hour, without a sensation of tranquillity and peace stealing over my spirit, as fancy pictured the lonely lodge, the soft twittering around it, and the dense shadows beyond.
I obeyed Mrs. Priestly, and never asked a question concerning Mr. Edwin, but I pondered much on this interesting subject; and whenever my thoughts turned away from the vanities of this world, they always rested with satisfaction on the ornithologist. ”

“ So much for climbing a greased pole in reflective, philosophical Paris!
Inquisitiveness has been well described as “an itch for prying into other people's affairs, to the neglect of our own; an ignorant hankering after all such knowledge as is not worth knowing; a curiosity to learn things that are not at all curious.” People of this stamp would rather be “put to the question” than not to ask questions. Silence is torture to them. A genuine quidnunc prefers even false news to no news; he prides himself upon having the first information of things that never happened. ”

“ The width of the Neva, its yielding bottom and shores, and the masses of ice which it sweeps down, make the erection of bridges so difficult that they are placed at very rare intervals, so that a person might be obliged to go miles before reaching one. But the stream is enlivened by boats and gondolas ready to convey passengers from one bank to the other. We were never weary of watching with a glass from the Admiralty tower, alternately, the river gay with boats and shipping, and the Perspectives thronged with their brilliant and motley crowd. ”

“ The knowledge of the best of us is but a little light which shines in a great deal of darkness. We are all of us more ignorant than wise. The proportion of knowledge yet lying beyond the confines of our explorations, is as a continent against a cabbage garden. Yet many thousands are contented to believe, that in this little bit of garden lies our all, and to laugh at every report made to the world by people who have ventured just to peep over the paling. ”

“ Our Old Indian is eloquent on kites, and the glory of their colors, which, in the days of other years, made her girlish heart leap, and her girlish eyes dazzle. The kite-shop is like a tulip-bed, full of all sorts of gay and gorgeous hues. The kites are made of Chinese paper, thin and tough, and the ribs of finely-split bamboo. A wild species of silkworm is pressed into the service, and set to spin nuck for the strings—a kind of thread which, although fine, is surprisingly strong. ”

“ Father, mother, children, enjoyed the quiet gladness of a household into which the noise of the great world without seldom penetrated. And in what else does happiness consist, than in gladness and contentment? He who possesses them needs to ask for nothing further. Had Master Heinzelmann always remembered that, he would have saved himself from much toil and vexation.
One fine summer evening the Tischlermeister left his workshop as usual, put on his lounging-jacket, lit his pipe, and turned his steps toward the front room, from whence came the noise of merry laughter and shouts of fun. ”

“ The lowest, commonest, and most readily apprehensible to the general reader, is that of a “fast young man,” such as “Punch” has for some time spitted weekly as a laughing-stock for half of the population. A little, lean, lathy, sickly-looking youth, delighting in rough short coats, monkey jackets, regatta shirts, big cigars, funny walking-canes, the smallest of boots, the most angular of hats, the most Brobdignagian of ties—rejoicing in a thinly-sown mustache or imperial, addicted to brandy-and-water and casinos, going out with the “afternoon delivery,” and coming in with the milk. ”

“ Randal had hitherto supposed that this notorious tuft-hunter—this dandy capitalist—this money-lender, whose whole fortune had been wrung from the wants and follies of an aristocracy, was naturally a firm supporter of things as they are—how could things be better for men like Baron Levy? But the usurer's burst of democratic spleen did not surprise his precocious and acute faculty of observation. He had before remarked, that it is the persons who fawn most upon an aristocracy, and profit the most by the fawning, who are ever at heart its bitterest disparagers. ”

“ This may be done by actions no less than words; but the adaptation of means to end, the passage of ideas from the brain of one man into the lives and souls of all, no less in action than in books, requires study. Action has its art as well as literature. Here Norreys had but to deal with the calling of the scholar, the formation of the writer, and so to guide the perceptions toward those varieties in the sublime and beautiful, the just combination of which is at once creation. Man himself is but a combination of elements. He who combines in nature, creates in art. ”

“ In less than a minute the light of day was shut forever from his eyes, the last prayerful accents from human lips were dumb to his ears, and the body of the malefactor, sinking with a sudden fall until half concealed by the level platform, struggled in the final throes of agony for a few moments—mercifully abbreviated, as some well-experienced amateurs at my side plainly pointed out, by the coadjutors of the hangman pulling heavily at the feet in the inclosure below—and then swung senseless, veering slowly round upon the now deserted stage. ”

“ I can only account for this difference in favor of a population among whom human life is at a far greater discount than it is with us, from the fact that among the French a public execution is a much more impressive spectacle than it can be made to be in England. The guillotine bears a higher character, perhaps, because it wears a more serious and terrible aspect than the gallows; and the functionary who controls its avenging blade does not, as with us, bear a name the synonym of all that is loathsome and repulsive. ”

“ And Harley himself stood amazed, and almost abashed, by the rich and marvelous beauty that beamed upon him. “My father's friend,” she said hesitatingly, “and I never to have seen you!”
“Ah, Signorina,” said Harley (and something of his native humor, half arch, half sad, played round his lip) , “you are mistaken there; you have seen me before, and you received me much more kindly then—”
“Signor!” said Violante, more and more surprised, and with a yet richer color on her cheeks. ”

“ Martha hesitated.
“But what, Martha?”
“Why, it seems so hard of missus not to let me have any followers; there's such lots of young fellows in the town; and many a one has as much as offered to keep company with me; and I may never be in such a likely place again, and it's like wasting an opportunity. Many a girl as I know would have 'em unbeknownst to missus; but I've given my word, and I'll stick to it; or else this is just the house for missus never to be the wiser if they did come: and it's such a capable kitchen—there's such good dark corners in it—I'd be bound to hide any one. ”