“ I have sometimes been glad, as my time came to face the long question which life puts to-day to all women who think and feel, and who care for other women and are loyal to them, that I had those early visions of my own to look upon.
When I was learning why the sun rose and the moon set, how the flowers grew and the rain fell, that God and heaven and art and letters existed, that it was intelligent to say one's prayers, and that well-bred children never told a lie, I learned that a mother can be strong and still be sweet, and sweet although she is strong ”

“ Yet the sun is so vast that if it were a hollow ball, and if the earth were placed at the centre of that ball, the moon could revolve in the orbit which it now follows, and still be entirely enclosed within the sun's interior.
For every acre on the surface of our globe there are more than ten thousand acres on the surface of the great luminary. Every portion of this illimitable desert of flame is pouring forth torrents of heat. ”

“ A few minutes passed, then Osra saw the prince return to where the lady was, and kneel again beside her; and she saw that the bishop was preparing to perform his most sacred and sublime office. The lady's eyes dwelt on him now in peace and restfulness, and held Prince Ludwig's hand in her small hand. But Osra would not kneel; she stood upright, still and cold, as though she neither saw nor heard anything of what passed; she would not pity nor forgive the woman even if, as they seemed to think, she lay dying. ”

“ A visit to Kirk Maughold will afford to the observer the best insight into Hall Caine's literary temperament. The spirit of the place expounds his spirit; its genius seems to have entered into him. There are seasons when this headland height lies serene and calm, wrapped in such loveliness of light on sea and land that the heart melts for very ecstasy at the beauty of all things around, the glowing hills, the flowers that are everywhere, the sea beyond, the tenderness, the color, the native poetry of it all. ”

“ There is little of the primitive Italian here, little of the painter who worships his Madonna through the medium of his craft as some great lady, "empress of heaven and of earth." Rembrandt's picture, lacking this mysticism, gains, however, in humanity; and however far even from our modern point of view it may be as a creation embodying the divine Motherhood, it throbs with tenderness. The homely interior, the good mother, the almost pathetic abandon of the sleeping child—surely no painter ever wrought better, nor, we may be sure, more devoutly! ”

“ It has sometimes occurred to me to find myself the possessor of a sort of unholy envy of writers concerning whom our stout American phrase says that they have "made themselves." What delight to be aware that one has not only created one's work, but the worker! What elation in the remembrance of the battle against a commercial, or a scientific, or a worldly and superficial heredity; in the recollection of the tug with habit and education, and the overthrow of impulses setting in other directions than the chosen movement of one's own soul! ”

“ I am under obligations to you for the artist's proof of the engraving of Abraham Lincoln as a young man. It is a surprising good fortune that you have this most interesting and admirable portrait. It is the one thing needed to tell the world the truth about Lincoln. The old daguerreotype was, after all, the best likeness, in the right light, ever made. This is incredibly fine. It shows Lincoln to have been in his youth very handsome, and the stamp of a manhood of noble promise is in this. There is manifest, too, intellectuality. ”

“ In silence they rode a long way, going at a great speed. Osra's face was set and rigid, for she felt now no shame at herself for going, nor any fear of what she might find. But the injury to her pride swallowed every other feeling, and at last she said, in short, sharp words, to the Bishop of Modenstein, having suddenly thrown the veil back from her face:
"He shall not live, if it prove true."
The bishop shook his head. His profession was peace; yet his blood, also, was hot against the man who had put a slight on Princess Osra. ”

“ When we consider that, even stripped of divinity, the birth of a child, its first dawning intelligence, its flower-like tenderness of aspect, are one and all motives which excite the best that is in man, there is little wonder that the Christ-child should have been and should still be the best subject that a painter could demand. In many forms, in fact, do we of a later day and of less fervent faith celebrate the beauty of mother and child. How much more ardently, therefore, in the days when faith and the painter's craft were so intimately linked, have the painters approached their task. ”

“ What should we think of the prudence of a man who, having been endowed with a splendid fortune of not less than twenty million dollars, spent one cent of that vast sum usefully and dissipated every other cent and every other dollar of his gigantic wealth in mere aimless extravagance? This would, however, appear to be the way in which the sun manages its affairs, if we are to suppose that all the solar heat is wasted save that minute fraction which is received by the earth. ”

“ You have studied the foreign drama, while I have not even read all the plays of Shakespeare. I can do a hundred parts conventionally well. You will, some day, do a great part as no other man on earth will do it, and then fame will come to you. Now you propose recklessly to throw all this away and go into the wilds of Africa."
"The particular ladder you offer to me," said Cromwell, "I have no desire to climb; I am sick of the smell of the footlights and the whole atmosphere of the theatre. I am tired of the unreality of the life we lead. Why not be a hero, instead of mimicking one?" ”

“ Her "Sunnyside" had already reached a circulation of one hundred thousand copies, and she was following it fast—too fast—by other books for which the critics and the publishers clamored. Her last book and her last baby came together, and killed her. She lived one of those rich and piteous lives such as only gifted women know; torn by the civil war of the dual nature which can be given to women only. It was as natural for her daughter to write as to breathe; but it was impossible for her daughter to forget that a woman of intellectual power could be the most successful of mothers. ”

“ Suppose that an army of stokers, arrayed in numbers which we need not now pause to calculate, were employed to throw this coal into the great solar furnace. How long, think you, would so gigantic a mass of fuel maintain the sun's expenditure at its present rate? I am but uttering a deliberate scientific fact when I say that a conflagration which destroyed every particle of coal contained in this earth would not generate so much heat as the sun lavishes abroad to ungrateful space in the tenth part of every single second. ”

“ Nature has not one law for the rich and another for the poor. The sun is shedding forth heat, and therefore, affirms this law, the sun must be shrinking in size. We have learned the rate at which this contraction proceeds; for among the many triumphs which mathematicians have accomplished must be reckoned that of having put a pair of callipers on the sun so as to measure its diameter. We thus find that the width of the great luminary is ten inches smaller to-day than it was yesterday. Year in and year out the glorious orb of heaven is steadily diminishing at the same rate. ”

“ The retort was a just one; for the fact is, that those of us whose lot requires them to live beneath the clouds and in the gloom which so frequently brood over our Northern latitudes, have but little conception of the surpassing glory of the great orb of day as it appears to those who know it in the clear Eastern skies. The Persian recognizes in the sun not only the great source of light and of warmth, but even of life itself. Indeed, the advances of modern science ever tend to bring before us with more and more significance the surpassing glory with which Milton tells us the sun is crowned. ”

“ Hence, in this, the earliest manifestation of Christian art, it is the remembrance of the majesty of a prophet, of the benign dignity of the mature Christ, that I we carry away with us. Giotto, however, had no sooner freed himself from the hampering conditions under which his predecessors worked, than we begin to feel the human element enter into art. Down through the centuries until to-day, the long procession of artists comes to us: those of Italy first of all, birthplace of modern art, land where time has touched everything with so reverent a hand that all has been rendered beautiful. ”

“ A stranger to my chart, I, doubtful, put about, and make the untried coast.
At such a moment, one thinks wistfully of that fair, misty world which is all one's own, yet on the outside of which one stands so humbly, and so gently. One thinks of the unseen faces, of the unknown friends who have read one's tales of other people's lives, and cared to read, and told one so, and made one believe in their kindness, and affection and fidelity for thirty years. ”

“ You never will learn any gumption! Why don't you look what you're about? Now, go around Christmas with your finger all tied up!"
"Oh, that'll be all right by to-morrow," said Mrs. Eliot, cheerfully. "Won't it, Emarine? Never cry over spilt milk, Mrs. Endey; it makes a body get wrinkles too fast. O' course Orville's mother's comin' to take dinner with you, Emarine."
"Dear me!" exclaimed Emarine, in a sudden flutter. "I don't see why them cranberries don't come! I told Orville to hurry 'em up. I'd best make the floatin' island while I wait." ”

“ For when I am working on a new book I think of nothing else; everything else comes to a standstill. In the afternoon I walk or ride, thinking, thinking. In the evenings, when it is dark, I walk up and down my room constructing my story. It is then that I am happiest. I do not write every day—sometimes I take a long rest, as I am doing at present—and when I do write, I never exceed fifteen hundred words a day. ”

“ The workman knows that the devouring blast furnace requires to be incessantly stoked with fresh fuel. How, then, comes it that a furnace so much more stupendous than any terrestrial furnace can continue to pour forth in perennial abundance its amazing stores of heat without being nourished by continual supplies of some kind? Professor Langley, who has done so much to extend our knowledge of the great orb of heaven, has suggested a method of illustrating the quantity of fuel which would be required, if indeed it were by successive additions of fuel that the sun's heat had to be sustained. ”

“ I thank you for a copy of the new portrait of Abraham Lincoln, which I shall promptly have framed and exhibited to my historical students. Indeed, I called it to their attention this morning, and they are all greatly interested in this remarkable likeness of the Saviour of his Country. The portrait indicates the natural character, strength, insight, and humor of the man before the burdens of office and the sins of his people began to weigh upon him. The prospect of a new life of Lincoln, revealing the Man as well as the Statesman, is most pleasing. ”

“ I thank you very much for the portrait of Lincoln you were kind enough to send me, reproduced from an early daguerreotype. It seems to me both striking and singular. The fine brows and forehead, and the pensive sweetness of the clear eyes, give to the noble face a peculiar charm. There is in the expression the dreaminess of the familiar face without its later sadness. ”

“ As a sponge exudes moisture by continuous squeezing, so the sun pours forth heat by continuous shrinking. So long as the sun remains practically gaseous, so long will the great luminary continue to shrink, and thus continue its gracious beneficence. Hence it is that for incalculable ages yet to come the sun will pour forth its unspeakable benefits; and thence it is that, for a period compared with which the time of man upon this earth is but a day, summer and winter, heat and cold, seedtime and harvest, in their due succession, will never be wanting to this earth. ”

“ Lincoln in the war time, I have not been so dependent upon photographs and engravings as have most of the men of my generation for an impression of Mr. Lincoln's personality. I can, however, say that the present picture has distinctly helped me to understand the relation between Mr. Lincoln's face and his mind and character, as shown in his life's work. It is, far away, the most interesting presentation of the man I have ever seen. To my eye it explains Mr. Lincoln far more than the most elaborate line-engraving which has been produced. ”

“ Out of every twenty million dollars' worth of heat issuing from the glorious orb of day, we on this earth barely secure the value of one single cent; and all but that insignificant trifle seems to be utterly squandered. We may say it certainly is squandered so far as humanity is concerned. No doubt there are certain other planets besides the earth, and they will receive quantities of heat to the extent of a few cents more. ”

“ We can go back to the splendid Byzantine churches, with their wealth of mosaic, their subdued splendor of dulled gold covering arch and pillar as a background for the glow of color with which the artists of Constantine worked,—in a rigid convention as to form which gives their figures an impressive air, but which is ill-suited to the representation of the divine Mother and Child. ”

“ As he has determined to make his home in the island, he is at present hesitating whether to purchase Greeba Castle, or to build himself a house on the Creg Malin headland at Peel, than which no more wondrous site for a poet's home could be found in the Queen's dominions, overlooking the bay, with the rugged pile of Peel Castle, memory haunted, beyond.
He loves the Manx and they love him. At first "society" in the island objected to his disregard of the conventions. Now he is as popular at Government House, or at the Deemster's, as he is in Black Tom's cottage. ”

“ It is at once the first and last chapter of the life of Lincoln. The young face of Lincoln, thus far unknown to the world, will be the most famous of all his portraits. It will be multiplied by the million, and be found in every house inhabited by civilized men. ”

“ All day we watched them hoist crying sheep and mild-eyed cattle, with a derrick, from row-boats, up over the deck, by the feet, and drop them down into the ship just as carelessly as a boy would drop a string of squirrels from his hand to the ground. The next morning we rode into the only harbor on the Syrian coast, and anchored in front of the beautiful city of Beyrout. ”

“ Then you look at the unspeakable poverty, the dreariness, the miles of piles of hueless rocks, and are interested. The desert is interesting because it is desolate, but it is an awful interest. The people—the beggars that hound you—are as poor, as dwarfed and deformed as the gnarled trees that try to live on the naked rocks.
One day in a narrow street we met two women who nearly blocked the way. ”