Harriet Martineau

“ Can I help honouring such a queen, and insisting on her being honoured, when her meanest subjects are encouraged by those who should be patterns of loyalty, to watch her conduct and revile her name?—Consider, aunt, I bear her name! Should that not bind me to her?”
“Not more than we are all bound by God having placed her on the throne. To say that she is Queen is to express our duty to her. Of that duty there is no question, my dear. The question is, how most faithfully to fulfil that duty, together with the duty of the King’s subjects to one another, and to generations to come. ”

“ On no other night perhaps could we have anything better than a bright moon chequering the woodland park with dark shadows and white gleams; but on the shortest night we like to observe how short it is. By the tender twilight we thread our way through the copses, and when we come to our own lawn we linger and listen to the owls from their hollow tree, and start at the bats as they flit by us, and hear midnight strike from the church steeple, and observe how faint the stars are, though the moon is far away. ”

“ When he did, it was to open a new region of ideas to mankind, preparing it for a wholly fresh conception of the structure of the universe. During the quiet years when he seemed to be like other men in his ways and his talk, only disclosing occasionally to those who could comprehend it a range of view and originality of speculation which warranted any amount of expectation from him, he was learning to see the visible frame of things with new eyes, and, in fact, to pass his life, amidst a scenery of nature immeasurably more sublime, wonderful, and beautiful than untrained minds can conceive of. ”

“ Here we have a horizon line so high that, when the sun is behind us in the early morning, the depth of the blue is as refreshing to the eye as the green vales seen from a mountain top, while the prodigious distance at which we can descry a white sail is a delicious marvel. We spend the early mornings on one or another of those high downs, being careful then and throughout the day never to be long out of sight of the Beacon, lest we should miss the approach of the pilchards. ”

“ Remember what reason I have to desire no further change in my life. I have striven to obtain my due position, and found myself disgraced and exiled. I have hoped to conquer my birthright by patience and policy; and death has cut short my scheme, and the world sees in me a disappointed man. At this very hour I find myself happy for the first time in all my days; and I take this as an admonition to be content. Not seeing me, the world will soon forget me; and then, Henrietta, we shall have nothing left to wish. ”

“ And vivid the hue really is; for the grass is never of a lovelier green than in October; and these sloping banks are kept dry and comfortable for the birds to dress their feathers, instead of being rank and woolly as in more fenny places. Near at hand there are coverts of rushes and reeds, and islets of long grass, for the feeding and hiding of the fowl; and here is the hubbub and the noise. Such a fluttering and dashing and splashing,—such a quacking and screaming and clatter, is heard nowhere else. The inland poultry-yard, from this time to Christmas, is nothing to a decoy district. ”

“ The early mornings are pleasant in London, however, when the sun-blinds are down, and the streets are watered, and flower-girls are displaying their treasures in every street. The evenings are pleasant, too, in the parks, where the noble trees show their stately and graceful forms, and the water looks cool, and the aquatic birds are dabbling and splashing. At night there is a scent of hay from afar, perceptible even in Regent Street, not at all to the delight of such citizens as are subject to “the hay-fever.” ”

“ We find pigs also ferreting out what they can find: and a good feast they make where the crop has been fully ripe.
These evenings among the corn-fields are like no others. There is the harvest-moon—so singular in its apparent bulk, and its hue, and its immediate appearance after sunset for several evenings together. To stand among the fields of some fertile plain, and see the great orb surge up from the abyss of the horizon, not like a disk gliding on the sky, but disclosing immeasurable depths of space beyond it, is an experience of August alone. ”

“ In such a case, there is a wistful lingering,—a hope in one or another that two or three of the victims may yet be breathing somewhere under the snow, near at hand; and when they turn away at last, and sink into the drifts in the absence of any path, they feel as if they did not care to get out again. They would as soon go to sleep in the cold for ever as not, for they are ruined. They love their flock; and there the poor things lie dead! Life is a blank now; and the looking forward into life makes them sick at heart. ”

“ Without attempting to prophesy how long he will reign, and whether he will die an emperor, or an exile, or a disgraced adventurer, we may say confidently, that the end will be failure in one way or another. Ours is not an age in which a man can wade through blood to a throne without having to answer for his crime. Ours is not an age in which a man can stifle liberty among thirty millions of people who have known in their own experience what liberty is. Ours is not an age in which arms can give empire in Europe, or in which territories can be captured and held at the pleasure of any man. ”

“ When the consumption of autumn geese begins, what an avidity do the women and girls show for the feathers! What bags are made and hung up in out-houses, or locked into closets, till the mistress is led by the nose to the discovery, and orders them out of the house! What a baking of them there is, if possible, when the family are off to the market; and how well it is if the wind sets the other way! And when the collections are sorted, and prepared, and weighed, what dreams there are of the prices to be offered at the fair! and what a chaffering there is when the fair-day arrives! ”

“ It may be easy to imagine the sun declining to the horizon, and then beginning to travel upwards again; but the precise quality of the light, and the singularity of the sensation, can no more be known at home than the emotion belonging to seeing the green lapse of Niagara into its cauldron, or the blue sharp-cut angles of the shady side of the Pyramids, discerned from fifty miles off. So I should not wonder if we find ourselves on the summit of some Norwegian hill, or the rocky crest of some North Sea island, on some longest day, instead of on our own lawn or the squire’s mere. ”

“ Harry did not stay. Colonel Hampden never wore the scarf; but his standard went to the fight on Chalgrove Field.
Henrietta had not known nor conceived what it would be to send men forth to fight against their King. If she had imagined what passion it was that she had been smothering within her for so many months, and how the dread of battle and the horror of blood would work upon her, she would rather have hidden herself and the children in any chalk-pit of the hills than have been at Hampden House that day.
Her husband had but a moment. ”

“ It has been the highest political treat of our time to see Italy taking a path parallel with ours; and if Prussia tries to recover the right track, out of which her Court and aristocracy are forcing her, nobody will rejoice more heartily than England.
Thus we see how it is that the troubles which disturb and darken the world’s day of progress are mainly retributions for old mistakes, and the working of the dregs of old abuses. We see how it is that growing enlightenment and fresh discoveries are not yet making society so tranquil and happy as might have been supposed. ”

“ I am always glad of an excuse for a night’s watching, to see the glitter of the torches in the long lines and broad patches of water left by the tide, and the long shadows of the men on the wet sand, and the black circle of figures round the pool, with a yellow face now and then visible from a flash of the torch within, and the basket of silvery, shining fish when there has been good success.
My children tell me I am an animal of nocturnal habits—at least, in the middle of summer. ”

“ It is not the sort of life which can ever fully exercise the moral faculties of any intelligent person: and if living in London really involved the necessity of young women growing up in this narrowness and hardness, it would be the greatest of misfortunes to live in London. We all know it to be otherwise, however: and where we meet with the most active and self-forgetting kindliness we generally see the gleam of happiness in the eye, the glow of health on the cheek, and the cheerfulness and bloom of genuine vigour and enjoyment pervading the whole mind and countenance. ”

“ July is their holiday season, and therefore a glorious and delicious month. I feel with them, not only because we all make holiday with them, but because there is a singular splendour in the full fruition of the summer, and in the depth of summer influences witnessed and felt in July. Its sultriness, its rains, its glare of sunshine and gravity of shade may sober down the exhilaration of the early year; but they create a deeper pleasure than that of exhilaration. Perhaps July is not exactly the month that I should choose for a long journey of pleasure ”

“ Rarely in the world’s history has any great empire been such a spectacle of political ruin and overthrow as Russia is now; and there is nothing in the aspect of the people to soften the horror of the sight. There is no middle class there, to obtain liberties, and preserve them at all cost. There is an aristocracy divided into an old Russian and modern German party: there is a bureaucracy which renders good government impossible: and there is a labouring class, freed from personal subjection, but ignorant beyond conception, and irritated by the disappointment of absurd expectations. ”

“ There is no question of the benefit and blessing of a thorough rousing of the spirit of a people in any case of self-defence. The holiness of a war of defence against invasion is nowhere denied: and the fervid glow of conscience and the keen joy of sympathy which sustain the spirits of patriotic men and women in times of sincere political revolution, mark the crisis as one of great dignity and charm, and the period as one in which it is a privilege to live. ”

“ One happy circumstance is the timely destination of so many young princes and princesses to thrones in Europe. Our four eldest royal children will all be rulers or wives of rulers: and the Denmark family has precisely the same prospect. If Popes and Kings will drive the world to count their years and watch their health, they must not mind hearing the fact that they are old and sickly. If the Czar is seldom sober, he must expect all Europe to see and say how hopeless, with that aggravation, is the prospect for himself and his people,—and for his victims, the Poles. ”