“ Whatsoever is harmonically composed, delights in harmony, which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all church music. For myself, not only from my obedience, but my particular genius, I do embrace it: for even that vulgar and tavern music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion and a profound contemplation of the First Composer; there is something in it of divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world and creatures of God ”

“ Muses, that inspire me with profound doctrines; Fountain, that cleansest me; Mountain, on whose ascent my heart uprises; Muses, that in discourse revive my spirits; Fountain, whose arbors cool my brows,--change my death into life, my cypress to laurels, and my hells into heavens: that is, give me immortality, make me a poet, render me illustrious!"
Tansillo--Well; because to those whom Heaven favors, the greatest evils turn to greatest good; for needs or necessities bring forth labors and studies, and these most often bring the glory of immortal splendor. ”

“ There never was a revolution in any country which destroyed the great body of the people. There have been convulsions of a most dire character which have overturned old-established monarchies and have hurled thrones and sceptres to the dust. There have been revolutions which have brought down most powerful aristocracies, and swept them from the face of the earth forever, but never was there a revolution yet which destroyed the people. ”

“ What an interchange of music there must be between Nature and a poet!"
Kenelm was startled. This "an innocent!"--this a girl who had no mind to be formed! In that presence he could not be cynical; could not speak of Nature as a mechanism, a lying humbug, as he had done to the man poet. He replied gravely:--
"The Creator has gifted the whole universe with language, but few are the hearts that can interpret it. Happy those to whom it is no foreign tongue, acquired imperfectly with care and pain, but rather a native language, learned unconsciously from the lips of the great mother. ”

“ Even as in life do the great dominant passions--love, ambition, desire of power, or gold, or fame, or knowledge--form the proud background to the brief-lived flowerets of our youth, lift our eyes beyond the smile of their bloom, catch the glint of a loftier sunbeam, and yet--and yet--exclude our sight from the lengths and the widths of the space which extends behind and beyond them. ”

“ The two portraits are very like each other, but plainly done at different times; it is a chubby, healthy face, deep-set, brooding eyes, as eager to tell what is going on within as to gather in all the glories from without; quick with the wonder and the pride of life; they are eyes that would not be soon satisfied with seeing; eyes that would devour their object, and yet childlike and fearless. And that is a mouth that will not be soon satisfied with love; it has a curious likeness to Scott's own, which has always appeared to us his sweetest, most mobile and speaking feature. ”

“ Browning sometimes dwells long--even dallies--over an idea, as does Shakespeare; turns it, shows its every facet; and even then it is noticeable, as with the greater master, that every individual phrase with which he does so is practically exhaustive of the suggestiveness of that particular aspect. But commonly he crowds idea upon idea even in his lyrics, and--strangely enough--without losing the lyric quality; each thought pressed down to its very essence, and each with that germinal power that makes the reading of him one of the most stimulating things to be had from literature. ”

“ I have so abject a conceit of this common way of existence, this retaining to the sun and elements, I cannot think this to be a man, or to live according to the dignity of humanity. In expectation of a better, I can with patience embrace this life, yet in my best meditations do often defy death: I honor any man that contemns it, nor can I highly love any that is afraid of it: this makes me naturally love a soldier, and honor those tattered and contemptible regiments that will die at the command of a sergeant. For a pagan there may be some motives to be in love with life ”

“ If generous honesty, valor, and plain dealing be the cognizance of thy family or characteristic of thy country, hold fast such inclinations sucked in with thy first breath, and which lay in the cradle with thee. Fall not into transforming degenerations, which under the old name create a new nation. Be not an alien in thine own nation; bring not Orontes into Tiber; learn the virtues, not the vices, of thy foreign neighbors, and make thy imitation by discretion, not contagion. Feel something of thyself in the noble acts of thy ancestors, and find in thine own genius that of thy predecessors. ”

“ I could never content my contemplation with those general pieces of wonder, the flux and reflux of the sea, the increase of the Nile, the conversion of the needle to the north; and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of nature, which without further travel I can do in the cosmography of myself: we carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature which he that studies wisely learns in a compendium, what others labor at in a divided piece and endless volume. ”

“ I have said that Ireland is a country of many wrongs and of many sorrows. Her past lies almost in shadow. Her present is full of anxiety and peril. Her future depends on the power of her people to substitute equality and justice for supremacy, and a generous patriotism for the spirit of faction. In the effort now making in Great Britain to create a free representation of the people you have the deepest interest. The people never wish to suffer, and they never wish to inflict injustice. They have no sympathy with the wrong-doer, whether in Great Britain or in Ireland ”

“ No--it is a dead man!"
"It is the priest Calenus," said the prætor, gravely. "What hast thou to say?"
"Arbaces of Egypt is the murderer of Apæcides, the priest of Isis; these eyes saw him deal the blow. It is from the dungeon into which he plunged me--it is from the darkness and horror of a death by famine--that the gods have raised me to proclaim his crime! Release the Athenian--he is innocent!"
"It is for this, then, that the lion spared him, A miracle! a miracle!" cried Pansa.
"A miracle! a miracle!" shouted the people; "remove the Athenian--Arbaces to the lion." ”

“ When I take a full view and circle of myself without this reasonable moderator and equal piece of justice, Death, I do conceive myself the miserablest person extant: were there not another life that I hope for, all the vanities of this world should not entreat a moment's breath from me; could the Devil work my belief to imagine I could never die, I would not outlive that very thought. ”

“ In an age when nearly every one was turning to the future and advocating the doctrine and the necessity of progress, when the chief fear of most men was that they should appear too much afraid of change, Brunetière proclaimed time and again that there was no safety for any nation or set of men except in a staunch adherence to tradition. He bade his readers turn their minds away from the current literature of the day, and take hold of the exemplars of excellence handed down to us by the great men of the past. ”

“ But just as poetry may degenerate into a musical collection of words and painting into a decorative association of colors, so humor may degenerate into the merely comic or amusing. The laugh which true humor arouses is not far removed from tears. Humor indeed is not always associated with kindliness, for we have the sardonic humor of Carlyle and the savage humor of Swift; but it is naturally dissociated from egotism, and is never more attractive than when, as in the case of Charles Lamb and Oliver Goldsmith, it is based on a loving and generous interest in humanity. ”

“ Pyramids, arches, obelisks, were but the irregularities of vainglory and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity. But the most magnanimous resolution rests in the Christian religion, which trampleth upon pride and sits on the neck of ambition, humbly pursuing that infallible perpetuity unto which all others must diminish their diameters, and be poorly seen in angles of contingency.
Pious spirits, who passed their days in raptures of futurity, made little more of this world than the world that was before it, while they lay obscure in the chaos of preordination and night of their forebeings. ”

“ Still, it was an awful and imposing spectacle, with which modern times have, happily, nothing to compare; a vast theatre, rising row upon row, and swarming with human beings, from fifteen to eighteen thousand in number, intent upon no fictitious representation--no tragedy of the stage--but the actual victory or defeat, the exultant life or the bloody death, of each and all who entered the arena! ”

“ Browne is intuitive and ever averse to controversy, feeling, as he exquisitely says, that "many have too rashly charged the troops of error and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth. A man may be in as just possession of the truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender." Calmly philosophic, he writes for kindred minds, and his concepts satisfying his own intellect, he delivers them with as little passion as an Æolian harp answering the wind, and lingers not for applause or explanation. ”

“ Women do not usually admire men who cast off their manhood or are unconscious of the rights and prerogatives of the stronger sex; and they admire just as little those "strong-minded women" who strive to excel only in the masculine virtues. I have never been persuaded that it argues well for a people when its women are men and its men women. Yet I trust I have always honored and always shall honor woman. I raise no question as to woman's equality or inequality with man, for comparisons cannot be made between things not of the same kind. ”

“ In brief, I am averse from nothing: my conscience would give me the lie if I should absolutely detest or hate any essence but the Devil; or so at least abhor anything but that we might come to composition. If there be any among those common objects of hatred I do contemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, virtue, and religion--the multitude: that numerous piece of monstrosity which, taken asunder, seem men and the reasonable creatures of God, but confused together, make but one great beast and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra: it is no breach of charity to call these fools ”

“ Mr. Rochester then turned to the spectators; he looked at them with a smile both acrid and desolate.
"That is my wife," said he. "Such is the sole conjugal embrace I am ever to know--such are the endearments which are to solace my leisure hours! And this is what I wished to have" (laying his hand on my shoulder) : "this young girl, who stands so grave and quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of a demon. I wanted her just as a change, after that fierce ragoût. Wood and Briggs, look at the difference. ”

“ I thank God for my happy dreams, as I do for my good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto reasonable desires, and such as can be content with a fit of happiness; and surely it is not a melancholy conceit to think we are all asleep in this world, and that the conceits of this life are as mere dreams to those of the next; as the phantasms of the night to the conceits of the day. ”

“ With all its imperfections of technique, its lapses of taste and faults of expression, it always remains poetry, throbbing with passion and emotion and rich in color and sound. She wrote because she must. Her own assertions notwithstanding, one cannot think of Mrs. Browning as sitting down in cold blood to compose a poem according to fixed rules of art. This is the secret of her shortcomings, as it is also the source of her strength, and in her best work raises her high above those who, with more technical skill, have less of the true poet's divine fire and overflowing imagination. ”

“ Her effort was always toward realism.
In her realism she reveals a second characteristic scarcely less marked than her creative powers,--an extraordinary faculty of observation. She saw the essence, the spirit of things, and the simplest details of life revealed to her the secrets of human nature. What she had herself seen and felt--the plain rugged types of Yorkshire character, the wild scenery of the moorlands--she reflected with living truth. She got the real fact out of every bit of material in humanity and nature that her simple life afforded her. ”