“ He was above all things a poet. In his prose as in his verse he has revealed the essential qualities of a poet's nature: he dealt with the life which he saw about him in a spirit of broad humanity and with genial sympathy. When he fashioned the tender triolet on the pitcher of mignonette, or sang of the little red box at Vesey Street, he wrote of what he knew; and his stories, even when embroidered with quaint fancies, tread firmly the American soil of the nineteenth century. But Bunner's realism never concerned itself with the record of trivialities for their own sake. ”

“ I am a conservative in its broadest and fullest sense, and such I shall ever remain, unless indeed the government shall become so corrupt and disordered that nothing short of revolution can reform it. I solemnly believe that our political system is, in its purity, not only the best that ever was formed, but the best possible that can be devised for us. It is the only one by which free States, so populous and wealthy, and occupying so vast an extent of territory, can preserve their liberty. ”

“ BY J. H. WESTCOTT
"Truly a wonderful man was Caius Julius Cæsar," says Captain Miles Standish. Truly wonderful he was on each of his many sides: as soldier, statesman, orator, and author, all of the first rank—and a respectable critic, man of science and poet besides.
As a writer of Latin prose, and as an orator, he was second to Cicero alone in the age that is called the Ciceronian; and no third is to be named with these two. Yet among his contemporaries his literary power was an insignificant title to fame, compared with his overwhelming military and political genius. ”

“ It is a constitution which respects all the great interests of the State, giving to each a separate and distinct voice in the management of its political affairs, by means of which the feebler interests are protected against the preponderance of the stronger. We call our State a Republic—a Commonwealth, not a Democracy; and let me tell the Senator, it is a far more popular government than if it had been based on the simple principle of the numerical majority. It takes more voices to put the machine of government in motion than in those that the Senator would consider more popular. ”

“ When we read 'Hamlet' and 'Lear,' or 'As You Like It' and 'Much Ado About Nothing,' we do not ask ourselves what Shakespeare meant by them,—why some scenes were written in verse and other scenes in prose,—for it is not of Shakespeare that we are thinking as we read, but of his characters, for whom we feel that he is no more responsible than we are, since they move, live, and have their being in a world of their own, above the smoke and stir of this dim spot which men call Earth,—the world of pure, perfect, poetic art. ”

“ Fernan Caballero gathered up these flowers of speech as they fell from the lips of the common man, and wove them into her tales. Besides their pictures of Andalusian rural life, these stories reveal a wealth of popular songs, ballads, legends, and fairy tales, invaluable alike to the student of manners and of folk-lore. She has little constructive skill, but much genius for detail. As a painter of manners and of nature she is unrivaled. In a few bold strokes she brings a whole village before our eyes. Nor is the brute creation forgotten. ”

“ What then are we to think, but that God will sometime bring us up out of the literature of the lower love, into that of the higher?—that as the age of passion yields to the age of reason, so the crude love of instinct will give place to the loftier, finer, more impelling love of God? And then around that nobler love, or out of it, shall arise a new body of literature, as much more gifted as the inspiration is purer and more intellectual. ”

“ What is called the musical scale, or octave, is fixed in the original appointments of sound just as absolutely and definitely as the colors of the rainbow or prism in the optical properties and laws of light. And the visible objects of the world are not more certainly shaped and colored to us under the exact laws of light and the prism, than they are tempered and toned, as objects audible, to give distinctions of sound by their vibrations in the terms of the musical octave. It is not simply that we hear the sea roar and the floods clap their hands in anthems of joy ”

“ Every Roman noble had to learn oratory. But Cæsar wrote and spoke with a faultless taste and a distinction that no training could impart. So we find in his style a beauty which does not depend upon ornament, but upon perfect proportion; a diction plain and severe almost to baldness; absolute temperateness of expression. The descriptions are spirited, but never made so by strained rhetoric; the speeches are brief, manly, business-like; the arguments calm and convincing; always and everywhere the language of a strong man well inside the limits of his power. ”

“ They grew up into magistrates, leaders of the people, debaters of right and of law, statesmen, generals, and signers of declarations for liberty. Such a mass of capacity had never been seen before in so small a body of men. And this is the first condition of liberty—the Condensation of Power. For liberty is not the license of an hour; it is not the butchery of a royal house, or the passion that rages behind a barricade, or the caps that are swung or the vivas shouted at the installing of a liberator. ”

“ Unguided save by his own consecrated genius, unaided by other books than his English Bible and Fox's 'Book of Martyrs,' he proceeded with a simplicity of purpose and felicity of expression, and with a fidelity to nature and life, which gave to his unconsciously artistic story the charm of perfect artlessness as well as the semblance of reality. When Bunyan's lack of learning and culture are considered, and also the comparative dryness of his controversial and didactic writings, this efflorescence of a vital spirit of beauty and of an essentially poetic genius in him seems quite inexplicable. ”

“ It is through the American trade of tea that your East India conquests are to be prevented from crushing you with their burden. They are ponderous indeed, and they must have that great country to lean upon, or they tumble upon your head. It is the same folly that has lost you at once the benefit of the West and of the East. This folly has thrown open folding-doors to contraband, and will be the means of giving the profits of the trade of your colonies to every nation but yourselves. Never did a people suffer so much for the empty words of a preamble. ”

“ Now this passion of love, which has hitherto been the staple of literature, is only a crude symbol in the life of nature, by which God designs to interpret, and also to foreshadow, the higher love of religion,—nature's gentle Beatrice, who puts her image in the youthful Dante, by that to attend him afterwards in the spirit-flight of song, and be his guide up through the wards of Paradise to the shining mount of God. ”

“ In the music of the morning, he hears the birds playing with their voices, and when the day is up, sees them sailing round in circles on the upper air, as skaters on a lake, folding their wings, dropping and rebounding, as if to see what sport they can make of the solemn laws that hold the upper and lower worlds together. And yet these play-children of the air he sees again descending to be carriers and drudges; fluttering and screaming anxiously about their nest, and confessing by that sign that not even wings can bear them clear of the stern doom of work. ”

“ It is a century since every conspicuous figure in the drama passed away; it is seventy years since every trace of the controversy disappeared from English political life; most if not all of the principles for which Burke contended have become commonplaces of English constitutional practice; the discontents of that day have vanished as completely as those of 1630: but Burke's pamphlet still holds a high place in every course of English literature, and is still read and pondered by every student of constitutional history and by every speculator on government and political morals. ”

“ But I will say she cannot refuse, if she has half the love of the Union which she professes to have; or without justly exposing herself to the charge that her love of power and aggrandizement is far greater than her love of the Union. At all events, the responsibility of saving the Union rests on the North, and not on the South. The South cannot save it by any act of hers, and the North may save it without any sacrifice whatever; unless to do justice, and to perform her duties under the Constitution, should be regarded by her as a sacrifice. ”

“ They are right. Day and night are not more different—more unlike in everything. They are unlike in their principles, their objects, and their consequences.
I shall not stop to make good this assertion, as I might easily do. The occasion does not call for it. As a conservative and a State Rights man, or if you will have it, a nullifier, I have resisted and shall resist all encroachments on the Constitution—whether of this Government on the rights of the States, or the opposite:—whether of the Executive on Congress, or Congress on the Executive. ”

“ Furious against the bull, and led on by a blind temerity, he would at all hazards remount his horse and return to the attack, in spite of the dizziness produced by his fall. It was impossible to dissuade him; they saw him indeed replace the saddle upon the poor victim, into the bruised flanks of which he dug his spurs.
"My lord Duke," said Stein, "I may perhaps appear to you ridiculous, but I do not wish to remain at this spectacle. Maria, shall we depart?"
"No," replied Maria, whose soul seemed to be concentrated in her eyes. "Am I a little miss? ”

“ The first study of life is ease. There is indeed no other study that pays the trouble of attainment. Don't you think so, ma'am?"
"But may not even that," said Cecilia, "by so much study become labor?"
"I am vastly happy you think so."
"Sir?"
"I beg your pardon, ma'am, but I thought you said—I really beg your pardon, but I was thinking of something else."
"You did very right, sir," said Cecilia, laughing, "for what I said by no means merited any attention."
"Will you do me the favor to repeat it?" cried he, taking out his glass to examine some lady at a distance. ”

“ Harnessed all together into the producing process, young and old, male and female, from the boy that rode the plow-horse to the grandmother knitting under her spectacles, they had no conception of squandering lightly what they all had been at work, thread by thread and grain by grain, to produce. They knew too exactly what everything cost, even small things, not to husband them carefully. Men of patrimony in the great world, therefore, noticing their small way in trade or expenditure, are ready, as we often see, to charge them with meanness—simply because they knew things only in the small ”

“ Yet while I thus openly avow myself a conservative, God forbid I should ever deny the glorious right of rebellion and revolution. Should corruption and oppression become intolerable, and not otherwise be thrown off—if liberty must perish or the government be overthrown, I would not hesitate, at the hazard of life, to resort to revolution, and to tear down a corrupt government that could neither be reformed nor borne by freemen. ”

“ Their hearts expanded in the healthy air about them, particularly the heart of Robert, which turned to thoughts of love,—not lightly, as in his boyish fancy for Nelly Kilpatrick, but seriously, as beseemed a man; for he was now in his nineteenth year, and as conscious of what he was to woman as of what woman was to him. A born lover, and a born poet, he discovered himself and his song at Tarbolton. ”

“ But for here and there a marking of time in prosaic passages which have nothing to do with the story, there is nothing to mar the catholicity of its spirit. Romanists and Protestants, Anglicans and Puritans, Calvinists and Arminians,—all communions and sects have edited and circulated it. It is the completest triumph of truth by fiction in all literature. More than any other human book, it is "a religious bond to the whole of English Christendom." ”

“ They were fresh, full of color and poetic feeling—romantic with the romance that abounds in the life they portrayed, redolent of indigenous perfumes,—magnolia, lemon, orange, and myrtle, mingled with French exotics of the boudoir,—interpretive in these qualities, through a fine perception, of a social condition resulting from the transplanting to a semi-tropical soil of a conservative, wealthy, and aristocratic French community. Herein lay much of their most inviting charm; but more than this, they were racy with twinkling humor, tender with a melting pathos, and intensely dramatic. ”

“ I tremble for the cause of humanity, in the unpunished outrages of the most wicked of mankind. But there are some people of that low and degenerate fashion of mind that they look up with a sort of complacent awe and admiration to kings who know how to keep firm in their seat, to hold a strict hand over their subjects, to assert their prerogative, and by the awakened vigilance of a severe despotism to guard against the very first approaches of freedom. ”

“ As a thinker Calhoun is remarkable for great powers of analysis and exposition. As a writer he is chiefly noted for the even dignity and general serviceableness of his style. He writes well, but rather like a logician than like an inspired orator. He has not the stateliness of Webster, and is devoid of the power of arousing enthusiasm. The splendor of Burke's imagination is utterly beyond him, as is also the epigrammatic brilliance of John Randolph,—from whom, however, he took not a few lessons in constitutional interpretation. ”