Harriet Beecher Stowe

“ When we shall see a New England artist, with his easel, in the fields, seeking, hour after hour, to reproduce on the canvas the magnificent glories of an elm, with its firmament of boughs and branches,—when he has learned that there is in it what is worth a thousand Claudes—then the morning star of art will have risen on our hills. God send us an artist with a heart to reverence his own native mountains and fields, and to veil his face in awe when the great Master walks before his cottage door. ”

“ Like the silent warfare of the sun on the glacier, is that overshadowing presence of Jesus, whose power, so still, yet so resistless, is now being felt through all the moving earth.
Those defiant waves of death-cold ice might as well hope to conquer the calm, silent sun, as the old, frozen institutions of human selfishness to resist the influence which he is now breathing through the human heart, to liberate the captive, to free the slave, and to turn the ice of long winters into rivers of life for the new heaven and the new earth. ”

“ I accept these congratulations and honors, and this offering, which it has pleased Scotland to bestow on me, not for any thing which I have said or done, not as in any sense acknowledging that they are or can be deserved, but with heartfelt, humble gratitude to God, as tokens of mercy to a cause most sacred and most oppressed. In the name of a people despised and rejected of men—in the name of men of sorrows acquainted with grief, from whom the faces of all the great and powerful of the earth have been hid—in the name of oppressed and suffering humanity, I thank you. ”

“ It is a gigantic ploughshare of rock, set up against the sky, its thin, keen, purple blade edged with glittering frost; for so sharp is its point, that only a dazzling line marks the eternal snow on its head.
I walked out as far as I could on a narrow summit, and took a last look. Glaciers! snows! mountains! sunny dells and flowers! all good by. I am a pilgrim and a stranger.
Already, looking down to the shanty, I see the guide like a hen that has lost a chicken, shaking her wings, and clucking, and making a great ado. I could stay here all day. ”

“ I cannot tell you how delightful to me, dizzy and weary as I was, was the first sight of the chamber of reception which had been prepared for us. No item of cozy comfort that one could desire was omitted. The sofa and easy chair wheeled up before a cheerful coal fire, a bright little teakettle steaming in front of the grate, a table with a beautiful vase of flowers, books, and writing apparatus, and kind friends with words full of affectionate cheer,—all these made me feel at home in a moment.
The hospitality of England has become famous in the world, and, I think, with reason. ”

“ The effect of such scenery to our generally sleeping and drowsy souls, bound with the double chain of earthliness and sin, is like the electric touch of the angel on Peter, bound and sleeping. They make us realize that we were not only made to commune with God, but also what a God he is with whom we may commune. We talk of poetry, we talk of painting, we go to the ends of the earth to see the artists and great men of this world; but what a poet, what an artist is God! Truly said Michael Angelo, "The true painting is only a copy of the divine perfections—a shadow of his pencil." ”

“ One fancies each corbel to have had its history, its archetype in nature; a thousand possible stories spring into one's mind. They are wrought with such a startling and individual definiteness, that one feels as about Shakspeare's characters, as if they must have had a counterpart in real existence. The pure, saintly nun may have been some sister, or some daughter, or some early love, of the artist, who in an evil hour saw the convent barriers rise between her and all that was loving. The fat, sensual face may have been a sly sarcasm on some worthy abbot, more eminent in flesh than spirit. ”

“ Light and shadow are beautiful things, capable of a thousand blendings, softenings, and harmonizings, which one loves to have represented: the great Artist of all loves light and shadow; why else does he play such a magical succession of changes upon them through all creation? But for an artist to make the most solemn mystery of religion a mere tributary to the exhibition of a trick of art, is a piece of profanity. What was in this man's head when he painted this representation of the hour when his Maker was made flesh that he might redeem a world? Nothing but chiaro-scuro and foreshortening. ”

“ We wind now among the pine tree still we come almost under the Mer de Glâce. A most fairy-like cascade falls down from under its pillars of ice over the dark rocks,—a cloud of feathery foam,—and then streams into the valley below.
"Voilà, L'Arveiron!" says the guide.
"O, is that the Arveiron?" say I; "happy to make the acquaintance."
But now we cross the Arve into a grove of pines, and direct our way to the ascent. We begin to thread a zigzag path on the sides of the mountain.
As mules are most determined followers of precedent, every one keeps his nose close by the heels of his predecessor. ”

“ If the bloom of English children appeared to me wonderful, I seemed to find the same thing intensified, if possible, in Scotland. The children are brilliant as pomegranate blossoms, and their vivid beauty called forth unceasing admiration. Nor is it merely the children of the rich, or of the higher classes, that are thus gifted. I have seen many a group of ragged urchins in the streets and closes with all the high coloring of Rubens, and all his fulness of outline. Why is it that we admire ragged children on canvas so much more than the same in nature? ”

“ For a wonder, it was a pleasant day, and this is a thing always to be thankfully acknowledged in England. The calm stillness of the afternoon, the seclusion of the whole place, the silence only broken by the cawing of the rooks, the ancient church, the mossy graves with their flowers and green grass, the sunshine and the tree shadows, all seemed to mingle together in a kind of hazy dream of peacefulness and rest. How natural it is to say of some place sheltered, simple, cool, and retired, here one might find peace, as if peace came from without, and not from within. ”

“ The greatest men have always thought much of flowers. Luther always kept a flower in a glass, on his writing table; and when he was waging his great public controversy with Eckius, he kept a flower in his hand. Lord Bacon has a beautiful passage about flowers. As to Shakspeare, he is a perfect Alpine valley—he is full of flowers; they spring, and blossom, and wave in every cleft of his mind. Witness the Midsummer Night's Dream. Even Milton, cold, serene, and stately as he is, breaks forth into exquisite gushes of tenderness and fancy when he marshals the flowers, as in Lycidas and Comus. ”

“ Did the worship of Egypt ever sink lower in horrible and loathsome idolatry? I had heard of such things; but it is one thing to hear of them, and another to see them by the light of this nineteenth century, in a city whose streets look much like the streets of any other, and where men and women appear much as they do any where else. Here we saw, in one morning, the splendor and the rottenness of the Romish system. From those majestic arches, that triumphant chant, there is but a step down to the worship of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. ”

“ I live in a house whose arrangements seem to me strange, old, and dreamy. In the heart of a great city I am as still as if in a convent; in the burning heats of summer our rooms are shadowy and cool as a cave. My time is all my own. I may at will lie on a sofa, and dreamily watch the play of the leaves and flowers, in the little garden into which my room opens; or I may go into the parlor adjoining, whence I hear the quick voices of my beautiful and vivacious young friends. ”

“ There, there is indeed a dazzling splendor of gas light. But there is nothing artistic, nothing refined, nothing appealing to the imagination. There are only hogsheads, and barrels, and the appliances for serving out strong drink. And there, for one sole end, the swallowing of fiery stimulant, come the nightly thousands—from the gay and well dressed, to the haggard and tattered, in the last stage of debasement. The end is the same—by how different paths! Here, they dance along the path to ruin, with flowers and music; there, they cast themselves bodily, as it were, into the lake of fire. ”

“ It would have been as absolutely impossible for even himself, had he been born in the daylight of this century, to have built those quaint, Gothic structures of imagination, and tinted them with their peculiar coloring of marvellousness and mystery, as for a modern artist to originate and execute the weird designs of an ancient cathedral. Both Gothic architecture and this perfection of Gothic poetry were the springing and efflorescence of that age, impossible to grow again. They were the forest primeval; other trees may spring in their room, trees as mighty and as fair, but not such trees. ”

“ To all that cruelty and injustice by which thousands of hearts are now bleeding, they appear entirely insensible. They speak with heartless levity of the revolutions of France, as of a pantomime got up for their diversion. Their time and thoughts seem to be divided between defences of American slavery and efforts to attach themselves to the skirts of French tyranny. They are the parasites of parasites—delighted if they can but get to an imperial ball, and beside themselves if they can secure an introduction to the man who figured as a roué, in the streets of New York. ”

“ What gives slavery its great strength in the United States? There are only about three hundred thousand slaveholders in the United States out of the whole twenty-five millions of its population, and yet they hold the entire power over the nation. That is owing to their unbroken unity on that one matter, however much, and however fiercely, they may contend among themselves on others. As soon as the subject of slavery comes up, they are of one heart, of one voice, and of one mind, while their opponents unhappily differ, and assail each other when they ought to be assailing the great enemy alone. ”

“ These flowers seemed to me to be earth's raptures and aspirations —her better moments—her lucid intervals. Like every thing else in our existence, they are mysterious.
In what mood of mind were they conceived by the great Artist? Of what feelings of his are they the expression—springing up out of the dust, in these gigantic, waste, and desolate regions, where one would think the sense of his almightiness might overpower the soul? Born in the track of the glacier and the avalanche, they seem to say to us that this Almighty Being is very pitiful, and of tender compassion ”

“ We pass again through the pine woods in the valley, and cross the Arve; then up the mountain side to where a tiny cascade throws up its feathery spray in a brilliant jet d'eau. Every body knows, even in our sober New England, that mountain brooks are a frisky, indiscreet set, rattling, chattering, and capering in defiance of all law and order, tumbling over precipices, and picking themselves up at the bottom, no whit wiser or more disposed to be tranquil than they were at the top; in fact, seeming to grow more mad and frolicsome with every leap. ”

“ The objection to Gothic architecture, as compared with Greek, is, that it is less finished and elegant. So it is. It symbolizes that state of mind too earnest for mere polish, too deeply excited for laws of exact proportions and architectural refinement. It is Alpine architecture—vast, wild, and sublime in its foundations, yet bursting into flowers at every interval.
The human soul seems to me an imprisoned essence, striving after somewhat divine. There is a struggle in it, as of suffocated flame; finding vent now through poetry, now in painting, now in music, sculpture, or architecture ”