Julia Ward Howe

“ His genius reaches its sublime maturity. He becomes acquainted with camps and courts, with the learning and the world of his day. But when, with all his powers, he would build a perfect monument to Truth, he takes her perfect measure from the hand of his child-love. The world keeps that work, and will keep it while literature shall last. It has many a subtle passage, many a wonderful picture, but at its height, crowned with all names divine, he has written, as worthy to be remembered with these, the name of Beatrice. ”

“ Among its marvels, my recollection dwells most upon the gallery of French paintings, in which I stood more than once before a full-length portrait of the then Emperor. I looked into the face which seemed to say: "I have succeeded. What has any one to say about it?" And I pondered the slow movements of that heavenly Justice whose infallible decrees are not to be evaded. In this same gallery was that sitting statue of the dying Napoleon which has since become so familiar to the world of art. Crowns of immortelles always lay at the feet of this statue. ”

“ All poetry, all doctrine, is founded upon human affection assumed as essential to life, nay, as life itself; for when love of life and its objects exists not, the vital flame flickers feebly, and expires early. In ethics, social and religious, what contradictions do we encounter under this head! From all inordinate and sinful affections, good Lord, deliver us! is a good prayer. But how shall we treat the case when there are no affections at all? We might add a clause to our litany,—From lovelessness and all manner of indifference, good Lord, deliver us! ”

“ What silver chisel turned the tender leaves of this marble foliage? Here is a little bit, a yard or so, which has escaped the gnawing of the elements, lying turned away from the course of the winds and rains! No king of to-day, in building his palace, can order such a piece of work. Artist he can find none to equal it. And I am proud to say that no king nor millionaire to-day can buy this, or any other fragment belonging to this sacred spot. What England took before Greece became a power again, she may keep, because the British Museum is a treasure-house for the world. ”

“ This august partnership is Marriage, one of the most difficult and delicate achievements of society. Too sadly does its mockery afflict us in these and other days. Either party, striving to dwarf the other, dwarfs itself. This mystic selfhood, inexpressible in literal phrases, is at once the supreme of Nature and the sublime of institutions. The ideal human being is man and woman united on the ideal plane. ”

“ When a Greek tragedy is performed before us, we are amazed at its force, its coherence, and its simplicity. What profound study and quick sense of the heroic in nature must have characterized the man who, across the great gulf of centuries, can so sweep our heart-strings, and draw from them such responsive music! Our praise of these great works almost sounds conceited. It would be more fitting for us to sit in silence and bewail our own smallness. ”

“ In ethics, Nature supplies the first half, but Religion, or the law of duty, supplies the other. Nature gives the enthusiasm of love, but not the tender and persevering culture of friendship, which carries the light of that tropical summer into the winter of age, the icy recesses of death.
Art has no need to intervene in order to bring together those whom passion inspires, whom inclination couples. But in crude Nature, passion itself remains selfish, brutal, and short-lived. ”

“ America never spends money better than in this way. Remember what this generation may be in danger of forgetting,—that we can never be so great ourselves as to be absolved from regarding the struggle for freedom, in the remotest corners of the earth, with tender sympathy and interest. And in the great reactions which attend human progress, when self-interest is acknowledged as the supreme god everywhere, and the ideals of justice and honor are set out of sight and derided, let the heart of this country be strong to protest against military usurpation, against barbarous rule. ”

“ Dante, passionate poet in his youth, has left to posterity a work unique of its sort,—the romance of a childish love which grew with the growth of the lover. In his adolescence, its intensity at times overpowers his bodily senses. The years that built up his towering manhood built up along with it this ideal womanhood, which, whether realized or realizable, or neither, was the highest and holiest essence which his imagination could infuse into a human form. ”

“ Romance is full of such shameful action; and let me say here, in passing, that in my opinion Romance often wears off our horror of what is wicked and heartless by showing it as a permanent and recognized element of society. This is the reverse of what it should do. But in these days it so exceeds its office in the hunt after the exhausted susceptibilities of a novel-reading public that it really thumps upon our aversion to vice until it wears it out. ”

“ We console the child with a simple word about heaven. He is satisfied, and feels its truth. How to attain this deathlessness is the next problem whose solution he will ask of us. We point him to the plane on which he will roll; for our life is a series of revolutions,—no straight-forward sledding, but an acceleration by ideal weight and propulsion, through which our line becomes a circle, and our circle itself a living wheel of action, creating out of its mobile necessity a past and a future.
The halfness of the individual is literally shown in the division of sex. ”

“ On the other hand, outside this charmed circle of fashion, I find the tone of taste and culture much higher than I remember it to have been in my youth. I find women leading nobler and better lives, filling larger and higher places, enjoying the upper air of thought where they used to rest upon the very soil of domestic care and detail. So the community gains, although one class loses,—and that, remember, the class which assumes to give to the rest the standard of taste. ”

“ I am sorry when I see people build palaces in America. We do not need them. Why should we bury fortune and life in the dead state of rooms which are not lived in? Why should we double and triple for ourselves the dangers of insufficient drainage or defective sanitation? Let us have such houses as we need,—comfortable, well aired, well lighted, adorned with such art as we can appreciate, enlivened by such company as we can enjoy. Similarly, I believe that we should, individually, come much nearer to the real purpose of a salon by restricting the number of our guests and enlarging their variety. ”

“ I think that as Americans we should all feel an especial interest in the maintenance of polite feeling in our community. The theory of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people is in itself the most polite of theories. The fact that under such a government no man has a position of absolute inferiority forced upon him for life ought to free us from mean subserviency on the one hand, and from haughty and brutal assumption on the other.
Yet I doubt whether politeness is as much considered in American education as it ought to be. ”

“ The secret of progress seems an infinitesimal seed, dropped in some bosoms to bear harvest for all. Seed and soil together give the product which is called genius. But genius is only half of the great man. No one works so hard as he does to obtain the result corresponding to his natural dimensions and obligations. The gift and the capacity to employ it are simply boons of Nature. The resolution to do so, the patience and perseverance, the long tasks bravely undertaken and painfully carried through—these come of the individual action of the moral man, and constitute his moral life. ”

“ The English are a most powerful and energetic race, with immense vitality, cruelly divided up in their own country by absolute social conditions, handed down from generation to generation. So a sense of superiority, more or less lofty and exaggerated, characterizes the upper classes, while the lower partly rest in a dogged compliance, partly indulge the blind instinct of reverence, partly detest and despise those whom birth and fate have set over them. In England, people assert their own rank and look down upon that of others all the way from the throne to the peasant's hut. ”

“ In the chance talk of people of culture, one hears of him all one's life long, as exceedingly amusing. From my brothers in college, I learned the "Frog Chorus" before I knew even a letter of the Greek alphabet. Many a decade after this, I walked in the theatre of Bacchus at Athens, and seeing the beauty of the marble seats, still ranged in perfect order, and feeling the glory and dignity of the whole surrounding, I seemed to guess that the comedies represented there were not desired to amuse idle clowns nor to provoke vulgar laughter. ”

“ Those lofty views of human affection and relation which we find in the great poets seem almost foreign to the civilization of to-day. I find in modern scepticism this same impatience of weighty thoughts. He who believes only in the phenomenal universe does not follow a conviction. A fatal indolence of mind prevents him from following any lead which threatens fatigue and difficult labor. Instead of a temple for the Divine, our man of to-day builds a commodious house for himself,—at best, a club-house for his set or circle. ”

“ Nations, like individuals, have their period of growth and decay, their limit of life, which human devices seem unable to prolong. But while systems of government and social organization change, race perseveres. The Greeks, like the Hebrews, when scattered and powerless at home, have been potent abroad. Deprived for centuries of political and national existence, the spirit of their immortal literature, the power of their subtle and ingenious mind, have leavened and fashioned the mind, not of Europe only, but of the thinking world. ”

“ Dante drinks now of a stream whose sweetness can never satiate, and from that holy wave returns,
It appears to me quite simple and natural that the image of the poet's earthly love, long lost from physical sense, should prompt the awakening of his higher nature, which, obscured, as he confesses, by the disorders of his mortal life, asserts itself with availing authority when Beatrice, the beloved, becomes present to his mind. All progress, all heavenly learning, is thenceforth associated with her. High as he may climb, she always leads him. Where he passes as a stranger, she is at home. ”

“ I should be sorry to overstate its shortcomings, but I wish I might help it to feel its obligations and to fulfil them.
What shall we accept in the ordinary sense of men as politeness? Shall we consider it a mere surface polish—an attitude expressive of deference—corresponding to no inward grace of good feeling? Will you like to live with the person who, in the great world, can put on fine manners, but who, in the retirement of home, manifests the vulgarity of a selfish heart and an undisciplined temper? ”

“ At the foot of the Acropolis, with the Parthenon in sight and the colossal statue of Minerva towering above the glittering temples, the poet and his audience surely had need to bethink themselves of the wisdom which lies in laughter, of the ethics of the humorous,—a topic well worth the consideration of students of philosophy. The ethics of the humorous, the laughter of the gods! "He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh them to scorn." ”

“ Arid love of pleasure, more arid worship of wealth, paralyze those higher powers of the soul which take hold on friendship and on love. To know those only who can advance your personal objects, be these amusement or ambition; to marry at auction, going, going, for so much,—how can we who have but one human life to live so cheat ourselves out of its real rights and privileges? ”

“ Ary Scheffer has shown them to us as in a beatific vision,—the stern spirit which did not fear to confront the horrors of Hell held in a silken leash of meekness by the gracious one through whose intervention he passed unscathed through fire and torment, bequeathing to posterity a record unique in the annals alike of literature and of humanity.
My first studies of the great poet are in the time long past, antedating even that middle term of life which was for him the starting-point of a new inspiration. ”

“ For this society, which is supposed to be nothing if not polite, does assume, in every place, to set up the standard of taste and to regulate the tone of manners. It aims to be what Hamlet once was in Ophelia's eyes—"the glass of fashion and the mould of form." Its forms and fashions change, of course, from age to age, and yet it is a steadfast institution in the development of human civilization. ”

“ The sacred city falls into his hands, without contradiction, so far as Europe is concerned. The veil of a dark and bloody barbarism hides the monuments of a most precious civilization. It is the age of blood. The nations of Western Europe have still the faith and the attributes of bandits. The Turkish ataghan is stronger than the Greek pen and chisel. The new race has a military power of which the old could only faintly dream. ”

“ I will build and bestow it in arts and charities, spin it in roads and replicate it in systems; but to be lopped from the great body of humanity, and decay like a black, amputated limb? My manhood refuses. The infinite hope within me generates another life, realizable in every moment of my natural existence, whose moments are not in time, whose perfect joys are not measured by variable duration. Thus every day can be to me full of immortality, and the matter of my corporeal decease full of indifference, as sure to be unconscious. ”