Mary Elizabeth Wilson Sherwood

“ Where society is founded on the provision that people know each other well and like each other, it certainly follows that there should be more "love," or liking at least, than where it is merely a matter of display. When society is bought it is apt to lose the distinction and the value of the company of such men as Dr. Bellows, if, indeed, there are many such. ”

“ I suppose a very mediocre actress. But she must have been a good woman to have had so serious and so good a daughter. Ristori had the temperament of virtue. She was naturally religious, firm, temperate, and judicious; and if not a genius, she certainly had incomparable talent. Her dresses were studies from all that history and art could do for the drama; she redeemed the honor of the Italian stage, and opened the door for Salvini, the greatest Othello and Hamlet and Samson that the world has seen. ”

“ Bellows by telling him I had never read Comus or Milton's prose. How soon he repaired that omission by reading Comus aloud to us in a masterly manner, and following it up by giving us readings from, and almost a lecture on, Wordsworth when he was paying us a visit at Keene! Society is like a Cremona violin; those who play upon it decide that the old ones are incomparable. "A crowd is not company, faces are but galleries of pictures, and talk is but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love." ”

“ These two great friends, great military geniuses, who were so true to each other and so free from any jealousy that they could write two such letters to each other as those of March 4, 1864, from Grant to Sherman, dated Nashville, Tennessee, and answered by Sherman March 10, 1864 (every school-boy should learn them by heart) ; these two great men, of all our heroes — one a President, the other a lieutenant-general — seem to have escaped that almost universal concomitant of greatness, ingratitude and lack of constancy on the part of the fickle public. ”

“ And yet how often the Presidency has simply meant that a man shall be abused, distrusted, and worked to death while he is filling the great office, and that he should drop into unmerited oblivion when he has left the White House (General Grant alone excepted) ! But, then, his fame was kept dear by the people. He could not travel through the remotest village that the farmer would not leave the plough in the furrow, and run for wife and children to come and see the man who had saved the nation. ”

“ Ristori, coming on as a young girl, the pretty auburn - haired princess, adroitly grew ten years older at every decade by putting on more clothes, more jewels, and more paint and whitewash, until the lion woman, sinking down to die on the stage, was the old Elizabeth who shook the dying countess for having deceived her about Leicester's ring. ”

“ Mrs. Robert Sedgwick was one of the entertainers of the literary and fashionable sets as they commingled when I first came to New York to live. It was there that I first met Bryant and Dr. Bellows and the illuminati generally. Her four charming daughters, her handsome son, Ellery Sedgwick, and their celebrated "Aunt Catharine," with Mrs. Sedgwick's wit and hospitality, drew all around her. It was a home to the somewhat lonely young woman, who had not then found her place. Dr. Lieber, the great philosopher, was there sometimes. Dr. Bellows was the delightful and genial talker of the group. ”

“ General Grant's tour around the world made him so replete with delightful reminiscence that he talked more when he came home. I remember dining with him at Governor Cornell's in New York, and it was a very distinguished dinner. I told him that an English officer who had been present at the dinner given him by the Duke of Wellington in the Waterloo Chamber told me in London that he thought him a very learned soldier. "Well, I am not," said Grant. "I had neither the genius of Sherman nor the learning of Lee or Macpherson. ”

“ Miss Julia Bryant, who knew how to mingle the elements which make up a dinner.
I often thought that his dinners might be compared to Rogers's breakfasts in London, so many bright minds conspired to make them eloquent. Mr. Bryant and his son-in-law, Parke Godwin, were kind to actors, then not so often invited into society as they are now; and at their houses I met Edwin Booth and his first lovely wife. Badeau and Booth were very intimate, and the former brought the great tragic actor often to my house. I never saw a more perfect union than that of the Booths. ”

“ As a girl she inherited from her father a great love of music, and Nature gave her a mezzo-soprano voice of the finest quality. She was good enough to sit down to the piano and accompany herself while singing me some of the very interesting Italian popular songs of the people. But her grandmother, a fine old tragic actress, probably seeing the genius for acting strong in the child, used to take away her guitar and shut her up in a trunk, "à la Ginevra," when she sang ”

“ My father, when rusticated from Middlebury College for some boyish pranks, kept the village school in Keene for one winter, and used to carry a little light-haired boy on his shoulder to school through the snow. ”

“ I suppose that this great man tasted the insincerity of human friendship and the ups and downs of fortune and the instability of fame as few men ever did, unless we may except James G. Blaine, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Samuel J. Tilden, all of whom had the Presidency within their grasp, but it slipped away. ”

“ Mr. Frothingham's wit, eloquence, and peculiar belief drew around him a set of worshippers of his own; he had for many years a large following. His excellent compendium Transcendentalism in New England is a most valuable book, being a thoughtful, scholarly history of that strange, mystical liberalizing of religious thought which swept over New England for forty years, doing much good and very little harm. ”

“ She played Lady Macbeth and Elizabeth, and was called the second Siddons. In 1864, she sailed for Egypt and played in Cairo, Athens, Constantinople, giving the tragedies of Alfieri beneath the shadow of the Pyramids.
She came to America with all this glory behind her, and was received, both as an actress and as a woman, with most enthusiastic welcome. She was an intelligent, industrious, earnest, good woman, with great sensibility and most wonderful talents; but as a successor to Rachel she never seemed to me a genius. She rose early ”