“ Colonel Gilmore, indeed, withholds no touch that can go to make him the hero of a dime novel; and there is not a more picturesque and dashing character in literature outside of the adventures of Claude Duval. Everywhere we behold him waving his steel (as he calls his sword) ; he wheels before our dazzled eyes like a meteor; he charges, and the foe fly like sheep before him. And no sooner is he come into town from killing a score or two of Yankees, than the ladies—who are all good Union women and have just taken the oath of allegiance—crowd to kiss and caress him ”

“ Poetry, ποίησις, or "making," creation, or re-creation, does not address itself to any single group of those faculties of our complex nature, the gratification of which brings a sense of the agreeable, the exhilarating, or the elevating. As well might we deny to didactic verse the name of poetry, as to those vers de société in which a profound truth may be found in a comic mask, or the foibles which scolding could not reach may be reflected in the mirror held up in gayety of heart. ”

“ When they have patience to look deeper than the surface, however, they see that there is a hidden might in the possibilities created by political freedom; and since the outbreak of the war which has cost the nation such blood and treasure, they have seen that they were not mistaken,—that prosperity had not wholly spoiled us,—that the latent force only needed a stimulus to resolve itself into noble action; and such lives as Lincoln's and Johnson's are to them the most glorious expositions of the principles for which they have borne everything, suffered everything, and hoped everything. ”

“ The provision markets of a community are a good index of the grade of its civilization. Tell me what a nation eats, what is its diet, and I will tell you what is its literature, its religious belief, and so forth. Solid, practical John Bull is a mutton, beef, and pudding eater. He drinks strong ale or beer, and thinks beer. He drives fat oxen, and is himself fat. He is no idealist in philosophy. He hates generalization and abstract thought. He is for the real and concrete. Plain, unadorned Protestantism is most to the taste of the middle classes of Great Britain. ”

“ It is M. Grimm's great merit to have described all these events so that they appear with the vividness of contemporaneous history, and to have clearly indicated their effect upon the life of his hero. He has given us a charming history of the sixteenth century, with Michael Angelo as its colossal central figure. The work contains much else that is admirable: reflections upon Grecian and Venetian art, and a sketch of the history of design in later times.—But to discuss or even to enumerate all its beauties, and to criticize its few defects, would be here impossible. ”

“ We know no work of fiction so full as this of beauty and wisdom, so free from folly, so resplendent with intellectual life, with moral purity, and Christian holiness, so apt to teach, so graceful in the teaching. We follow it with admiration and sympathy, from its gay beginning, through all the pain, the passion, and the peace, to the heartache of its closing pages,—that close, supremely sad, yet strangely beautiful. ”

“ Is it generous, is it just in a novelist, to lift us up to a pitch of tragic frenzy, and then drop us down into the last scene of a comic opera? We refuse to be comforted by the fact that the novelist does not, perhaps, consciously mock our expectation.
Let us take the moral of "Griffith Gaunt,"—so poignant and effective for the most part,—and see how lamentably it suffers from the defective art of the dénouement. ”

“ What it lacks, art is incapable to express; what it has lost, memory is powerless to restore.
There is, at least, some temporary solace to a bereaved country in this,—that so much has been saved from the remorseless demands of Death; though the old grief will ever come back to its still uncomforted heart, when it turns to that tomb by the Western prairie, within whose sacred silence so much sweetness and kindly sympathy and unaffected love have passed away, and the strange pathos, that we could not understand, and least of all remove, has faded forever from those sorrowful eyes. ”

“ We must demand of literary art, however, that it shall interest in people's fortunes by first interesting in people. Can any one of all Mr. Collins's readers declare that he sympathizes with the loves of Armadale and Neelie Milroy, or actually cares a straw what becomes of either of those insipid young persons? Neither is Midwinter one to take hold on like or dislike; and Miss Gwilt is interesting only as the capable but helpless spider out of which the plot of the story is spun. Pathos there is not in the book, and the humor is altogether too serious to laugh at. ”

“ However this might have been, certain it is that all the grand imagery of the battle-field and the fight, of spear and breastplate, shield and sword, of soldierly manliness and fidelity, by which St. Paul symbolizes the warfare of life, and the armor of those who would come off conquerors, is literally and gloriously realized in Mr. Robertson's course and in himself. He was a soldier of the sublimest type,—a bold, earnest, self-denying, effective, and high-souled battler of the worst foes of man, and the gentle, kindly, loving defender of the weak, the unfriended, the wronged. ”

“ A young New-Englander, rich, handsome, generous, and thoroughly taught by books and by ample experience of the Old World and the New to honor men and freedom, passes a few days in a Slave State, in the midst of that cruel system which could progress only from bad to worse; to which reform was death, and which with the instinct of self-preservation punished all open attempts to ameliorate the relations of oppressor and oppressed, and permitted no kindness to exist but in the guise of severity or the tenderness of a good man for his beast ”

“ It there becomes part and parcel of the eye, the organ of light and the throne of expression,—of the blood, which is so eloquent in cheek and brow,—of the nerves, the telegraph-wires of the soul,—of the persuasive tongue,—of the tear-drop, the dew of emotion, which only the human eye can shed,—of the glossy tresses of beauty, the nets of love. ”

“ The character of Kate Gaunt is treated in the dénouement with a violence which almost destroys its identity, but throughout the whole previous progress of the story it is a most artistic and consistent creation. From the beautiful girl, so virginal and dreamy and insecure of her destiny in the world, with her high aspirations and her high temper, there is a certain lapse to the handsome matron united with a man beneath her in mind and spirit, and assured of the commonplace fact that in her love and duty to him is her happiness ”

“ They are sparkling, rapid, condensed, and pointed; they gratify our national pride; their animated and picturesque style never suffers the attention to flag for a moment; and yet it is in these very chapters that judicial criticism will find the most frequent occasion to pause and doubt, whether we consider the direction in which the stream of thought flows, or their merely rhetorical features. Mr. Bancroft's glittering generalizations do not always seem to us to wear the sober livery of truth. ”

“ To bring up young men from college with no knowledge of the country in which the great drama of modern politics and national life is now being worked out,—who are ignorant of a country like America, but who, whether it be for good or for evil, must exercise more influence in this country than any other class,—to bring up the young destitute of such knowledge, and to place them in responsible positions in the government is, I say, imperilling its best interests ”

“ Yet one cannot help thinking with a shudder of the hideous spectacle of "Eros" in the jaws of Blackwood or the mortal Quarterly, thirty years ago; or of how ruthlessly our own Raven would have plucked the poor trembling life from the "Patriotic Poems," or "The Contest," or the "Poems."
The world grows wiser and better-natured every day, and the tender statistician has long since stayed the hand of the critic. "Why strike," says the gentle sage, "when figures will do your work so much more effectually, and leave you the repose of a compassionate soul? ”

“ There is a great deal of good writing in the book, and it leaves nothing to be desired in the way of advanced sentiment. But we fail to perceive its bearing upon the progress of ideas. It may flatter a superficial scientific optimism, but it will obstruct rather than promote the interests of philosophic thought, for this reason, that it inclines the reader to suspend his convictions upon some fated progress of events which will of itself do the world's thinking for it, and turn both heart and mind at last into cheerful, complacent pensioners of science. ”

“ My own view of the inhabitants of Mars is that they are Rational Articulates. Rational they certainly are, and, although I am no naturalist, I venture to pronounce them Articulates. I do not mean anything disrespectful to these learned inhabitants of Mars in saying that their figure and movements reminded me of crickets: for I never have watched the black field-crickets in New England, standing on tiptoe to reach a blade of grass, without a feeling of admiration at their gentlemanly figure and the gracefulness of their air. ”

“ Robertson's personal and representative manifestation, we should say, that he, more than any other man of the age, was the saint of the new liberalism, even of the extreme radicalism. More than any other conspicuous man who had cast aside and spurned the old traditionalisms of credulity, ignorance, and prejudice, he consecrated free-thinking. For each single negation he offers a positive belief, or a tenable ground of belief, which substitutes an efficient and quickening tenet for a faith such as will satisfy and sanctify. ”

“ And yet, in regenerating its institutions, it was not guided by any speculative theory or laborious application of metaphysical distinctions. Its form of government grew naturally out of its traditions, by the simple rejection of all personal hereditary authority, which in America had never had much more than a representative existence. Its people were industrious and frugal. Accustomed to the cry of liberty and property, they harbored no dream of a community of goods; and their love of equality never degenerated into envy of the rich. ”

“ Señor Sarmiento understands our institutions theoretically, as only those foreigners can who have suffered the ills of tyranny and oppression. Such men look at us from their various stand-points, and reason ethically upon the effect which freedom from all undue authority should have upon the human mind, and they judge of us by our theory rather than by our practice; and when they come amongst us, they are often disappointed and disheartened to find that we, too, are selfish and hesitate to stretch the helping hand to our fellow-sufferers. ”

“ If it had been one united country, like the United States, instead of being cut up into so many governments, it would have been easier for foreigners (if, indeed, North Americans should be called foreigners in South America) to follow it in its various changes; but, except where some great man, like Bolivar, made himself conspicuous, it was difficult, without much investigation of details, to keep the track of their proceedings, or to tell which side was specifically right,—for a revolution, to be very interesting, must have its foundation in great principles. ”

“ Enough! to live is the end of eating, not to be pleased and made better with objects, odors, flavors. Therefore welcome a few articles of food in violation of every fine sensibility. Stuff in and masticate the crudest forms of eatables,—bad-cooking, bad-looking, bad-smelling, bad-tasting, and worse-feeling,—down with them hastily,—and then, between your headaches and gastric spasms, pride yourself upon virtues and temperance not possessed by any student in the gastronomic school of Epicurus! ”

“ He is so absorbed in the contemplation of the accidents of history as to forget that history itself is but a narrow river, conducting to the broad, illimitable ocean of human brotherhood or equality,—and that to stand upon the bank, therefore, and watch its successive waves, instead of manfully leaping in and committing one's life and fortunes to it, is scarcely the part of a wise man. ”

“ If we could read the silent history of these last years, should we not find in thousands of young hearts the story of a resolve no less firm, of a pain scarcely less deadly? The pent-up agony in the prison-house of Slavery before Northern cannon thundered at its doors is a tale that will never be told. God grant its horrors may never be surpassed,—never renewed! ”