“ The age when Englishmen dwelt in their own land as a conquered race, when their name and tongue were badges of contempt and slavery, when England was counted for little more than an accession of power to the Duke of Rouen in his struggle with the King of Paris, is an age than which we can conceive none more alien to every feeling and circumstance of our own. ”

“ Shall we never cease to stamp human nature, even in childhood, like coins? to overlay it with foreign images and foreign superscriptions, instead of letting it develop itself and grow into form according to the law of life planted in it by God the Father, so that it may be able to bear the stamp of the Divine, and become an image of God?...
This theory of love is to serve as the highest goal and polestar of human education, and must be attended to in the germ of humanity, the child, and truly in his very first impulses. ”

“ And well-nigh every other obscure or infamous name in the roll-call of the mushroom nobility of modern Rome has tried its hand at the same evil work. Nothing can be so ancient, nothing so beautiful, nothing so sacred, as to be safe against their destroying hands. The boasted age of the Renaissance, the time when men turned away from all reverence for their own forefathers and professed to recall the forms and the feelings of ages which are forever gone, was the time of all times when the monuments of those very ages were most brutally destroyed. ”

“ The distinctive character of English history is its continuity. No broad gap separates the present from the past. If there is any point at which a line between the present and the past is to be drawn, it is at all events not to be drawn at the point where a superficial glance might perhaps induce us to draw it,—at the Norman invasion in 1066. At first sight, that event might seem to separate us from all before it in a way to which there is no analogy in the history either of our own or of kindred lands. Neither France nor Germany ever saw any event to be compared to the Norman Conquest. ”

“ Our present race of ephemeræ will in a course of minutes become corrupt, like those of other and older bushes, and consequently as wretched. And in philosophy how small our progress! Alas! art is long and life is short! My friends would comfort me with the idea of a name they say I shall leave behind me; and they tell me I have lived long enough to nature and to glory. But what will fame be to an ephemera who no longer exists? and what will become of all history in the eighteenth hour, when the world itself, even the whole Moulin Joly, shall come to its end, and be buried in universal ruin? ”

“ God knows how he can hold fast to his Christian faith. They call it freedom, humanity; but it is not that. It is hate, venom, bad blood. They will tear from them all bonds, as Balle says, raise a revolt—revolt against all that is beautiful and good, against God, against belief. H'm! Build the State, this whole earthly life, upon a heathen foundation! Sever connection with Christianity, cast the Church away from them like old trash. That is terrible! And free love, free thought—the Christian religion out of the schools—no! that is Satan himself who rages. ”

“ These principles of Froebel's, many of them the products of his own mind, others the pure gold of educational currency upon which he has but stamped his own image, are so true and so far-reaching that they have already begun to modify all education and are destined to work greater magic in the future. The great teacher's place in history may be determined, by-and-by, more by the wonderful uplift and impetus he gave to the whole educational world, than by the particular system of child-culture in connection with which he is best known to-day. ”

“ Poets speak of the Fountain of Youth: it does exist; it gushes up from the earth at every step we take. And one passes by without drinking of it!
The young girl I loved, married of her own choice to a rival, passed, all gray-haired, into the eternal rest. I have found her daughter—so that my life, which before seemed to me without utility, now once more finds a purpose and a reason for being.
To-day I "take the sun," as they say in Provence; I take it on the terrace of the Luxembourg, at the foot of the statue of Marguerite de Navarre. It is a spring sun, intoxicating as young wine. ”

“ As educators of mankind, the women of the present time have the highest duty to perform, while hitherto they have been scarcely more than the beloved mothers of human beings....
But I will protect childhood, that it may not as in earlier generations be pinioned, as in a strait-jacket, in garments of custom and ancient prescription that have become too narrow for the new time. I shall show the way and shape the means, that every human soul may grow of itself, out of its own individuality. ”

“ As far as to the sea, no maid nor youth but must join the lusty dance which she devises. On the other hand comes the king to break up the dancing, fearful lest some one will rob him of his April queen. Little, however, cares she for the graybeard; a gay young 'bachelor' is there to pleasure her. Whoso might see her as she dances, swaying her fair body, he could say in sooth that nothing in all the world peers the joyous queen!" Then, as after each stanza, for conclusion the wild refrain—like a procul este, profani!—"Away, ye jealous ones, away! Let us dance together, together let us dance!" ”

“ On another side it is to be recommended to foreigners, as affording a body of information about Spain such as the mere traveler could never attain, and which it is useless to look for in fiction depending for its interest upon clever devices of plot and fantastic adventure. It lets an illumination into the heart of what has been the most reserved and mysterious country of Europe. It shows the true Spain, and not merely the conventional one of strumming guitars and jingling mule bells. With all its strangeness, we see it full of that genuine human nature that makes the world akin ”

“ The chaplain sat and sulked, and looked into one of the Norse papers. "Here stands the same," said he. "No, but—? Yes, the same, and yet not the same. The Norse paper has cut out or changed all that treats directly of Christianity; the rest is the same."
"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed Hans.
"Yes, they are as wise as serpents," sighed the chaplain. "Here may plainly be seen how the matter stands. It is hidden away in politics, but the spirit they cannot conceal; it is precisely the same French spirit of hell, the spirit of revolt, the spirit of the Devil, which lifts itself against even the living God. ”

“ You must know, my own love, that there are beings in the elements which bear the strongest resemblance to the human race, and which at the same time but seldom become visible to you. The wonderful salamanders sparkle and sport amid the flames; deep in the earth the meagre and malicious gnomes pursue their revels; the forest spirits belong to the air, and wander in the woods; while in the seas, rivers, and streams live the widespread race of water spirits. ”

“ Yet, however cruel was the Six Articles Bill, the governing classes even among the laity were unanimous in its favor. The King was not converted by a sudden miracle; he believed the traditions in which he had been trained; his eyes, like the eyes of others, opened but slowly; and unquestionably, had he conquered for himself in their fullness the modern principles of toleration, he could not have governed by them a nation which was itself intolerant. Perhaps, of all living Englishmen who shared Henry's faith, there was not one so little desirous in himself of enforcing it by violence. ”

“ Judged by the standard he himself set up, Freeman's chief merits, the qualities which mark him out as a great historian, are an intense love of truth and a determination to discover it at any cost; a sincere desire to mete out an even-handed justice to each and every man; unflagging industry, common-sense, broad views, and the power to reproduce the past most graphically. ”

“ She gave him the painter's eye, the poet's fancy, and it is as the artist of chivalry he lives to-day. His chronicle may be often false to historical fact, it may not display a broad and sympathetic intelligence or a generous impatience of conventionality, but it does please, it does enthrall. It is one of those books without moral intent, like the Arabian Nights, which the boys of all ages will persist in reading, and which men delight in if they love good pictures and good story-telling. ”

“ The possibility of perfect manhood is what you read in your child's eye, just as the perfect flower is prophesied in the bud, or the giant oak in the tiny acorn. A presentiment that the ideal or generic human being slumbers, dreams, stirs in your unconscious infant—this it is, O mother, which transfigures you as you gaze upon him. Strive to define to yourself what is that generic ideal which is wrapped up in your child. Surely, as your child—or in other words, as child of man—he is destined to live in the past and future as well as in the present. ”

“ They give themselves out for sheep, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. They promise you freedom, but they give you thraldom, the thraldom of sin, which is the worst of all. They promise you blessings and joy, but they steal you away from Him who alone has blessings and freedom for our poor race. They promise you security and defense against all tyranny and oppression, but they give you gladly into his power who is the father of all tyranny and of all evil; he who is the destroyer of man from the beginning. ”