“ When Abel began to recover, he could scarcely raise himself from the ground. He looked round, but could see nothing of Paul. "They have bound us together," said he; "and something is drawing me toward him. There is no help for me; I must go whither he goes." As he was drawn nearer and nearer to the hut he seemed to struggle and hang back, as if pushed on against his will. At last he reached the doorway; and clinging to its side with a desperate hold, as if not to be forced in, put his head forward a little, casting a hasty glance into the building. "There he is, and alive!" breathed out Abel. ”

“ And as this image of Philosophy, as the fairest of women, whose eyes and whose smile reveal the joys of Paradise, gradually took clear form, it coalesced with the image of Beatrice herself, she who on earth had been the type to her lover of the beauty of eternal things, and who had revealed to him the Creator in his creature. But now having become one of the blessed in heaven, with a spiritual beauty transcending all earthly charm, she was no longer merely a type of heavenly things, but herself the guide to the knowledge of them, and the divinely commissioned revealer of the wisdom of God. ”

“ She droops not; and her eyes rising so high might be hidden by distance. But being what they are, they cannot be hidden; through the treble veil of crape which she wears, the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be read from the very ground. She is the defier of God. She also is the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. ”

“ It is true that Dickens drew most of his material from his own observation of life, and from his fertile imagination, which was often fantastic. It is true that he could not be called in the narrow sense a literary writer, that he made no literary mosaic, and few allusions to the literature of the world. Is it not probable that he had the art to assimilate his material? For it is impossible that any writer could pour out such a great flood about the world and human nature without refreshing his own mind at the great fountains of literature. ”

“ He is primarily a moralist who is also a poet. Of Homer the man, and of Shakespeare the man, we know, and need to know, nothing; it is only with them as poets that we are concerned. But it is needful to know Dante as man, in order fully to appreciate him as poet. He gives us his world not as reflection from an unconscious and indifferent mirror, but as from a mirror that shapes and orders its reflections for a definite end beyond that of art, and extraneous to it. And in this lies the secret of Dante's hold upon so many and so various minds. He is the chief poet of man as a moral being. ”

“ Virgin Mother, daughter of thine own Son, humble and exalted more than any creature, fixed term of the eternal counsel, thou art she who didst so ennoble human nature that its own Maker disdained not to become His own making. Within thy womb was rekindled the love through whose warmth this flower has thus blossomed in the eternal peace. Here thou art to us the noonday torch of charity, and below, among mortals, thou art the living fount of hope. Lady, thou art so great, and so availest, that whoso wishes grace, and has not recourse to thee, wishes his desire to fly without wings. ”

“ The Athenians of those days went not in quest of an orator or a general who could help them to prosperous slavery; but they scorned life itself, if it were not the life of freedom. Each of them regarded himself as the child not only of his father and of his mother, but of his country; and what is the difference? He who looks on himself as merely the child of his parents, awaits death in the ordinary course of nature; while he who looks on himself as the child also of his country, will be ready to lay down his life rather than see her enslaved.... ”

“ Hitherto the noise has been so great, and the prejudices and passions of men so strong, that it had been but in vain to offer at any argument, or for any man to talk of giving a reason for his actions; and this alone has been the cause why, when other men, who I think have less to say in their own defense, are appealing to the public and struggling to defend themselves, I alone have been silent under the infinite clamors and reproaches, causeless curses, unusual threatenings, and the most unjust and unjurious treatment in the world. ”

“ During her life Voltaire's science of unbelief and Rousseau's appeal to nature and sentiment were stimulating Europe. For Rousseau, Madame du Deffand had no respect; but Voltaire's philosophy appealed to her egotism. It bade a human being investigate his own puzzles, and seek solution in himself. Madame du Deffand agreed, but failed to find satisfaction in her anxious analysis; she envied believers in God, and longed for illusions, yet allowed herself none. Jealous, exacting, critical, with all the arrogance of the old aristocracy, she was as merciless to herself as to others. ”

“ While all controlled reasoning was suspended under the incantation of opium, his quick mind, without conscious intent, without prejudice or purpose, assembled such mysterious and wonderful sights and sounds as the naked soul might see and hear in the world of actual experience. For De Quincey's range of action and association was not as narrow as might seem. He had walked the streets of London friendless and starving, saved from death by a dram given by one even more wretched than he, only a few months after he had talked with the king. ”

“ Ancient Rome largely shaped modern Christianity,—by the transmission of the idea of the authority which the Empire once exerted to the Church which grew up upon its ruins. The tremendous drama of Roman history displayed itself to the imagination from scene to scene, from act to act, with completeness of poetic progress and climax,—first the growth, the extension, the absoluteness of material supremacy, the heathen being made the instruments of Divine power for preparing the world for the revelation of the true God ”

“ Again, he was preserved from the danger of going down too deep and too low into the unclean mysteries of modern humanity, not so much perhaps by moral delicacy as by an artistic distaste for all that is repulsive and unseemly. For those reasons, it would not be surprising if—when Death has made him young again—Alphonse Daudet was destined to outlive and outshine many who have enjoyed an equal or even greater celebrity during this century. He will command an ever increasing circle of admirers and friends, and generations yet unborn will grow warm in his sunshine. ”

“ We looked into the belfries, where the pendulous bells were waiting in vain for the summons which should awaken their marriage peals; together we touched the mighty organ keys, that sang no jubilates for the ear of Heaven, that sang no requiems for the ear of human sorrow; together we searched the silent nurseries, where the children were all asleep, and had been asleep through five generations. "They are waiting for the heavenly dawn," whispered the Interpreter to himself: "and when that comes, the bells and the organs will utter a jubilate repeated by the echoes of Paradise." ”

“ Surely not so the ringing of the great bell of the château, nor the running up and down the stairs, nor the hurried figures on the terrace, nor the booting and tramping here and there and everywhere, nor the quick saddling of horses and riding away?
What winds conveyed this hurry to the grizzled mender of roads, already at work on the hill-top beyond the village, with his day's dinner (not much to carry) lying in a bundle that it was worth no crow's while to peck at, on a heap of stones? Had the birds, carrying some grains of it to a distance, dropped one over him as they sow chance seeds? ”

“ It is a mistake to call 'Robinson Crusoe' a "great boy's book,"—unless we regard the boy nature as persistent in all men, and perhaps it is in all healthy men,—for it treats the unaided conflict with nature and circumstance, which is the essence of adult life, with unequaled simplicity and force. Crusoe is not merely an adventurer; he is the human will, courage, resolution, stripped of all the adventitious support of society. ”

“ I bid you send supplies to the troops in Chersonesus, and do what else they require; prepare yourselves and make every effort first, then summon, gather, instruct the rest of the Greeks. That is the duty of a State possessing a dignity such as yours. If you imagine that Chalcidians or Megarians will save Greece, while you run away from the contest, you imagine wrong. Well for any of those people if they are safe themselves! This work belongs to you; this privilege your ancestors bequeathed to you, the prize of many perilous exertions. ”

“ Again, in the play-house we miss the man who tells the story, the happy presence—so unlike Flaubert's cheerless impassibility—the generous anger, the hearty laugh, the delightful humor, that strange something which seems to appeal to every one of us in particular when we read his novels. Dickens was once heard to say, on a public occasion, that he owed his prodigious world-wide popularity to this: that he was "so very human." The words will apply with equal felicity to Daudet's success. He never troubles to conceal from his readers that he is a man. ”

“ These latter phenomena perhaps possess for me a peculiar interest, from their intimate connection with the geological structure of the world. The earthquake, however, must be to every one a most impressive event: the earth, considered from our earliest childhood as the type of solidity, has oscillated like a thin crust beneath our feet; and in seeing the labored works of man in a moment overthrown, we feel the insignificance of his boasted power.
It has been said that the love of the chase is an inherent delight in man—a relic of an instinctive passion. ”

“ She groans not. But she sighs inaudibly at intervals. Her sister Madonna is oftentimes stormy and frantic, raging in the highest against Heaven, and demanding back her darlings. But Our Lady of Sighs never clamors, never defies, dreams not of rebellious aspirations. She is humble to abjectness. Hers is the meekness that belongs to the hopeless. Murmur she may, but it is in her sleep. Whisper she may, but it is to herself in the twilight. Mutter she does at times, but it is in solitary places that are desolate as she is desolate, in ruined cities, and when the sun has gone down to his rest. ”

“ There only remains, therefore, the idea of God, in which I must consider whether there is anything that cannot be supposed to originate with myself. By the name God I understand a substance infinite, eternal, immutable, independent, all-knowing, all-powerful, and by which I myself, and every other thing that exists,—if any such there be,—were created. But these properties are so great and excellent, that the more attentively I consider them, the less I feel persuaded that the idea I have of them owes its origin to myself alone. ”

“ The noble Soul in old age returns to God as to that port whence she set forth on the sea of this life. And as the good mariner, when he approaches port, furls his sails, and with slow course gently enters it, so should we furl the sails of our worldly affairs and turn to God with our whole mind and heart, so that we may arrive at that port with all sweetness and peace. ”

“ The pure passion of abstract thought fires each to do the best that is his to do. His life is to be the word-for-word translation of his own spirit."
The death-bed repentance of a century, born skeptical, reared decadent, and professing practical materialism; the conversion of a literature from the pure passion of the senses to the pure passion of abstract thought; the assumption of an apostolic mission by journalists, novelists, playwrights, college professors, and scientific masters, will doubtless furnish the century to come with one of its most curious and interesting fields of study. ”

“ I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. ”

“ The vast region of the unknown, which encircled with its immeasurable spaces the little tract of the known world, appealed to their fancy and their spirit of enterprise, with its boundless promise and its innumerable allurements to adventure. Learning, long confined and starved in the cell of the monk, was coming out into the open world, and was gathering fresh stores alike from the past and the present. ”

“ And how think ye a man who behaves so insolently to all, how will he act when he gets each separately under his control?
But what has caused the mischief? There must be some cause, some good reason why the Greeks were so eager for liberty then, and now are eager for servitude. There was something, men of Athens, something in the hearts of the multitude then which there is not now, which overcame the wealth of Persia and maintained the freedom of Greece, and quailed not under any battle by land or sea; the loss whereof has ruined all, and thrown the affairs of Greece into confusion. ”

“ And as a pilgrim, who goes along a road on which he never was before, thinks every house he sees afar off to be his inn, and not finding it so, directs his trust to the next, and thus from house to house till he comes to the inn, so our soul at once, on entering the new and untraveled road of this life, turns her eyes to the goal of her supreme good, and therefore whatever thing she sees which seems to have in it some good, she believes to be that. ”

“ We are never wholly convinced, perhaps, of the eternal truth of his conclusions, but we like to watch him arrive at them. They seem fresh and strange, and we are dazzled by the constantly changing material. Nothing can be more delightful than the constant influx of new objects of thought, the unexpected incidents, the seemingly inexpugnable logic that ends in paradox, the play of human interest in a topic to which all living interest seems alien. There is scarcely a page in all De Quincey's writings that taken by itself is actually dull. ”