Russell H. Conwell

“ His visit to the Mexican capital was an occasion of great interest to him, and brought up freshly and vividly the story which Prescott has so well told of the Aztecs and the heroic age of Cortez. No scene in Europe is said to combine such extremes of sweetness and grandeur, of light and shade, of valley and hill, of plain and cragged highland, of land and water, of art and nature, as the valley of Mexico. There he saw the evidences of prehistoric civilization, and looked with curiosity and awe upon the towering fortress of Chapultepec, which connects the present with the ages past. ”

“ It is a great boon to be born of such a physical and mental combination as that of the German soldiers, with all their coolness and bravery, and the even-tempered, God-fearing Quakers, with all their grace and wisdom. Such intermixture has given to our young nation much of its surprising enterprise and originality, and must, at last, when consolidated into a compact people, produce a nation and a race wholly unlike any other on the earth. ”

“ There have been but few incidents of American life more pathetic and remarkable than the spontaneous exhibition of love and admiration by the people of Mr. Taylor’s native town, when his body was taken there for burial. The silent and uncovered crowds, the tears, the regrets, the stories of his kindness, the honest acts of deference, the noble reception of any one who had been his friend, all served to make up a most unusual tribute to the memory of a great man. ”

“ It was there that in the crimson and lurid days of ’94, the Red Revolutionists each day filled the baskets at the foot of the guillotine with the heads of twoscore and often threescore citizens. Who would surmise that in a city so gay, so cheerful, so imbued with the very spirit of pleasure and childlike life, such hideous deeds of blood and destruction could be performed! Quick-tempered, excitable people, going with the flash of a thought from one extreme to the other. No place in all Paris better exhibits the character of the nation, than the Place de la Concorde. ”

“ He thought of his old nurse and her tales of the Alpine scenery, and of the knolls and vales of his own home. It is no wonder that the Swiss are free and brave and strong. The waterfalls, cliffs, and cloud-piercing mountains fill the soul with a sense of grandeur and glory which tends toward great deeds and fervent patriotism. Who can recall the eternal snows, the towering shafts of rock, the roaring caverns, and sweetest of blue lakes, without the most thrilling emotions! If there are any travellers upon whom the memory of Switzerland brings no such feelings, they are the exceptions. ”

“ But to those students who love scientific scrutiny, who would estimate the life for what it is really worth as an example, the biography which is written amid all the facts, and by one who comes in actual contact with them, is perhaps esteemed the most valuable, although, as a whole, less symmetrical.
Bayard Taylor’s life was rugged and cragged with startling events, when viewed from the kindly poetical stand-point of his character. He felt all the extremes of joy and sorrow. He knew all the pains and honors of poverty and wealth. He was loved by many, he was betrayed by many. ”

“ A bewildering forest of peaks and towers confuse the student of its outline, and innumerable collections of exquisitely wrought groups and statues dishearten and confuse the student of art. Yet the unity of its proportions, and the symmetry of its arches and cornices, were recognized [100] by all. Bayard trod its artistic pavement with feelings of awe and admiration. He gazed long upon its aisles and pillars, and crept on tip-toe into the shadows of its great altar. It is one of the most solemn things in life to stand in such a temple of genius. ”

“ There remains in all the world but one other place for the artist after he has seen and appreciated Florence. His love for the exquisitely sweet and beautiful is satisfied,—all the tender and delicate links between art and nature can there be seen and felt. An exhibition of the mighty, grand, colossal side of art remains; and to the lover of such exhibitions, and to the romance-seeker who, like Bayard, desires to walk the dusty halls, peopled with the ghosts of half-forgotten ages, Rome still waits. ”

“ Those bright youths must have feasted on the associations connected with Dumbarton. As they peered from Wallace’s tower, handled Wallace’s sword, and gazed over the wide landscape, with the sites of battle-fields, castles, palaces, the home of Bruce, the cottage of Wallace, the beautiful valleys of the Clyde and Leven, the majestic Ben Lomond, and the crests of the Highlands, they grew in intellectual stature, and breathed a moral atmosphere as pure as the air that encircled the flagstaff at the summit. ”

“ A whole week those young men searched the great city for valuable information. They slept and ate in the rudest of taverns, and tramped the city with the workmen and the beggars, but they were gathering the forces for a useful life. Bayard was filled with the sublimity of the mighty human torrent that, like a tide, rolls into London in the morning, dashes about the highways during the day, and surges outward at night. ”

“ In exhortation to thy surviving dear ones, from the impulse of my heart as thine oldest friend in the Old World, as thou were wont to call me, and as representing German literature, I bid thee now a parting farewell. What thou hast become and art to remain in the empire of mind history will determine. To-day our hearts do quake with grief and sorrow, and yet they are exalted. ”

“ No excursion from Bombay exceeds that to Elephanta in romantic attractions; for there are not only extensive ruins of greater and lesser temples, but the landscape, wherein the greenest islands dot the sheen of a gorgeous bay, is bright with most beautiful flowers and bright leaves, and the air is permeated with the odor of roses and cassia. Soon Elephanta will be a “summer resort,” and Taylor’s description and reflections will be sold by newsboys as a guide-book. ”

“ No city in the world contains such rich decorations, such unique and profuse ornamentation, or such harmony of design and arrangement, as is shown in the palace halls and public edifices of Munich. How a visit to them sweetens everything else in after life, and how the memory of them ever lightens the burden of care! What American could walk those pavements and floors and not yearn for the power to give to his own country something to match those marvellous structures! Bayard must have felt that impulse in common with others ”

“ At the Propylæa, which crowns the mountain with beauty and majesty, where all the destructive inventions of two thousand years have failed to annihilate the monument which Phidias and Calicrates erected to their genius, Mr. Taylor was overwhelmed with emotions, and gazed with wonder at the chaste sculpture which adorns the most graceful structure ever made of marble, and in silent awe contemplated the pillars, cornices, tablets, pavements, and broken ornaments with which he was surrounded. ”

“ But yet the pains he felt so keenly, the dangers he encountered so frequently, did not seem to abate his enthusiasm for the great works and beautiful scenes which Europe exhibits. To find ourselves in a strange city, where no one speaks our native language; where it is not possible that any person can know us or any of our friends; without money, or food, or work, is one of the most disheartening situations that can be imagined. Yet such an experience came often to Bayard. ”

“ At Dumbarton, Bayard had his first narrow escape, and he said that when he reached the ground, after daring to scale, for flowers, the precipice up which Wallace climbed with his followers for glory and fatherland, he was in such a tremor of terror, in view of his having so narrowly escaped death, that he could scarcely speak. The unusual strength of a little tuft of wild grass, growing in a crevice of the cliff, had saved him from being dashed to pieces. ”

“ Bayard had read of Leipsic and Dresden in his boyhood when other boys were catching rabbits or playing ball, and as when he sees the great citadel at Magdeburg which once held Baron Trenck a prisoner, so when at Leipsic he looks over the field where Blucher and Schwartzenberg met Napoleon, he is startled with the vividness of the pictures in his imagination. Hundreds of thousands rushing to combat and scattering in retreat while smoke rolls [84] upward from hundreds of cannon and the streams are choked with piles of bloody dead! ”

“ As Goethe, like every great genius, had many eccentricities, as he drew many of his illustrations from events in his own experience and scenes which he had visited, it was necessary to a full understanding of the great theme, to study Goethe’s characteristics, habits of thought, education, and experience.
In short, if one were to translate Goethe, he must be like Goethe in experience and mental composition. He must know what Goethe knew; must look upon man and his complicated life as Goethe looked upon it in his time and circumstances. ”