Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

“ Carries shoulders well back and walks well, as if proud of her woman's life, with a slight rocking movement, being one of the wide-flanged pattern, but seems restless,--a hard girl to look after. Has a romance in her pocket, which she means to read in school-time.--Charlotte Ann Wood. ”

“ The next morning the lady-teacher looked pale and wearied, naturally enough, but she was in her place at the usual hour, and Master Langdon in his own.
The girls had not yet entered the school room.
"You have been ill, I am afraid," said Mr. Bernard.
"I was not well yesterday," she, answered. "I had a worry and a kind of fright. It is so dreadful to have the charge of all these young souls and bodies. Every young girl ought to walk locked close, arm in arm, between two guardian angels. ”

“ What a miserable thing it is to be poor. She was dependent, frail, sensitive, conscientious. She was in the power of a hard, grasping, thin-blooded, tough-fibred, trading educator, who neither knew nor cared for a tender woman's sensibilities, but who paid her and meant to have his money's worth out of her brains, and as much more than his money's worth as he could get. ”

“ The poor young lady's work had, of course, been doubled since the departure of Master Langdon's predecessor. Nobody knows what the weariness of instruction is, as soon as the teacher's faculties begin to be overtasked, but those who have tried it. The relays of fresh pupils, each new set with its exhausting powers in full action, coming one after another, take out all the reserved forces and faculties of resistance from the subject of their draining process. ”

“ Yet every now and then one is liable to be surprised with strange clairvoyant flashes, that can hardly be explained, except by the mysterious inspiration which every now and then seizes a young girl and exalts her intelligence, just as hysteria in other instances exalts the sensibility,--a little something of that which made Joan of Arc, and the Burney girl who prophesied "Evelina," and the Davidson sisters. ”

“ I don't mean to say that something may not be added by Nature to make up for losses and keep the race to its average, but we are mainly nothing but the answer to a long sum in addition and subtraction. No doubt there are people born with impulses at every possible angle to the parallels of Nature, as you call them. ”

“ She went to her seat, which she had moved a short distance apart from the rest, and, sitting down, began playing listlessly with her gold chain, as was a common habit with her, coiling it and uncoiling it about her slender wrist, and braiding it in with her long, delicate fingers. ”

“ She was tall and slender, but rounded, with a peculiar undulation of movement, such as one sometimes sees in perfectly untutored country-girls, whom Nature, the queen of graces, has taken in hand, but more commonly in connection with the very highest breeding of the most thoroughly trained society. ”

“ A negative condition, often confounded with genius, and sometimes running into it. Young people who fall out of line through weakness of the active faculties are often confounded with those who step out of it through strength of the intellectual ones.
The girls kept coming in, one after another, or in pairs or groups, until the schoolroom was nearly full. Then there was a little pause, and a light step was heard in the passage. The lady-teacher's eyes turned to the door, and the master's followed them in the same direction.
A girl of about seventeen entered. ”

“ A poor country-clergyman dies, and leaves a widow and a daughter. In Old England the daughter would have eaten the bitter bread of a governess in some rich family. In New England she must keep a school. ”

“ Black, piercing eyes, not large,--a low forehead, as low as that of Clytie in the Townley bust,--black hair, twisted in heavy braids,--a face that one could not help looking at for its beauty, yet that one wanted to look away from for something in its expression, and could not for those diamond eyes. They were fixed on the lady-teacher now. ”

“ Such odd fancies are common enough in young persons in her nervous state. Many of these young people will jump up twenty times a day and run to dabble the tips of their fingers in water, after touching the most inoffensive objects.
This composition was written in a singular, sharp-pointed, long, slender hand, on a kind of wavy, ribbed paper. There was something strangely suggestive about the look of it, but exactly of what, Miss barley either could not or did not try to think. The subject of the paper was The Mountain,--the composition being a sort of descriptive rhapsody. ”

“ She was consequently, in plain English, overworked, and an overworked woman is always a sad sight,--sadder a great deal than an overworked man, because she is so much more fertile in capacities of suffering than a man. ”

“ Each of us is only the footing-up of a double column of figures that goes back to the first pair. Every unit tells,--and some of them are plus, and some minus. If the columns don't add up right, it is commonly because we can't make out all the figures. ”

“ The virtue of the world is not mainly in its leaders. In the midst of the multitude which follows there is often something better than in the one that goes before. Old generals wanted to take Toulon, but one of their young colonels showed them how. ”

“ Slight obliquities are what we have most to do with in education. Penitentiaries and insane asylums take care of most of the right-angle cases.--I am afraid I have put it too much like a professor, and I am only a student, you know. ”

“ Good ministers will tell you they have parishioners who beat them in the practice of the virtues. A great establishment, got up on commercial principles, like the Apollinean Institute, might yet be well carried on, if it happened to get good teachers. ”