“ Today nothing more moving is in sight than a few straggling clam-diggers, and even they are spiritless, for the fresh-water floods of last winter have destroyed the young mollusks near the Columbia.
The sea to me is not an object of love. It is an emblem of remorseless strength used without love or pity. It is cruel, cold, often beautiful, but never to be thought of with a tender longing. So we turn away from the beach and plunge into a forest pathway overhung by shrubby cliffs on one side and a wealth of arborescent beauty on the other. ”

“ The rich and powerful family of the Youngs, however distant, are indisputably your relations; the aged and venerable Lady Fung presides with great dignity over the ancestral mansion, and people say that as she advances in years she more than ever compassionates the poor, and pities the aged and needy. If she has forgotten you, there is no one to blame but yourself; striving as you are with a foolish false pride, you don't fancy bending, bowing and scraping to these big people, who know so well how to be cool and distant to the proud and egotistic poor. ”

“ Among all the disappointments which showered upon the loyal people of America during the four years between the fall of Fort Sumter and the capture of Richmond, scarcely one was more unexpected than the circumstance that the public opinion of all of the world, sufficiently enlightened to be of consequence, was enlisted in behalf of the enemies of our country. And this, aggravated by the obvious fact that the nearer to ourselves in civilization and in consanguinity, the more pronounced was the judgment, the more decided the repugnance to our cause. ”

“ A slight bend of the river, and Luxor with its obelisks, and columns, and statues of gods, and ruined temples, bursts upon the view. To the right are seen the Vocal Memnon, the palace and temples of the Pharaohs; while on every side, for miles and miles, stretches the broad plain that enshrines the dust of Thebes. We leave our Nile boat, and under the escort of an army of donkey-boys, pay a hurried visit to the Temple of Luxor. Time has cruelly played the vandal with it. Of all the grandeur of the once glorious edifice only a few pillars and scarred walls remain. ”

“ What a naked, spiritless coast scene! To the south of my position (at Long Beach,) the green headland of the Cape stands with its feet in the sea. Some large rocks and bowlders are scattered for a little distance above that, and then, nothing! Not a shell, or wading bird, not even a rope of kelp on the sands, or a bit of colored seaweed to catch the eye; only the ever-restless, but at this season unimpassioned, sea. Even the wind has ceased to buffet us, and only the free motion of our clean-limbed roadster makes a breeze to quicken the blood in our cheeks. ”

“ Can you ticket every passenger through to San Francisco—to Oakland—to Sacramento—even to Virginia City? Shall not the route be represented as well as the termini? And where our people travel, that is the highway of our thought. Will the trains be freighted only with merchandize, and shall we exchange nothing but goods? Will not our civilization gain by the subtle inflowing current of Eastern refinement, and shall we not, by the same channel, throw into Eastern exclusiveness something of our own breadth and liberality? ”

“ Awhile one lazily watches the tree-tops drift across the sky, while resting back on the packs, the Indians deftly steering or plying paddle meanwhile, or on a likely bar the canoe is beached, and all eagerly search for freshest signs of elk, or deer or bear.
Spattering showers, which came at first, have ceased. A clear sky greets us, as the harbor opens out beyond the last big trees ; and here a safer canoe is taken, or a skiff or sail-boat, if at hand and the tide in, for a distant harbor town. ”

“ The triumph of the National cause in America has not given democracy the final victory, though the success of the rebellion would have turned the scale against it.
If ever an aristocracy deserved success in such a struggle, it is this one of England. The old system of France, before the Revolution swept it away, was steeped in sensuality and vice of every class nameable and unnameable. The aristocracy of Russia is charged with cruelty and corruption sufficient to exclude it from a place in modern civilization. ”

“ Take a school of girls, where no fixed period is in prospect for the pupil to quit it; extend its sphere so that it may be a home for any spinsters choosing it; unite with it any and all means and machinery for employment, of which women are capable; make it in fact a university, with its resident fellows, its circles of doctorates; its laws and regulations neither so lax as to create confusion and impair its success, nor so severe as to hamper the material advantages of freedom; and the intellectual sphere of woman will be widened to an extent commensurable to the capital and labor expended. ”

“ Our men had their blood up: hunger, thirst, and fatigue, all vanished with the first ring of the carbine, seconded by the clear trumpet-tones of McCleave's voice, as he led the attack. So we took every chance; but we had surprised the enemy in our turn, our carbines were close and well aimed, and the foe went down before the attacks of our horsemen and foot as snow falls before the sun's heat. Many a personal duel occurred, but in no case were the Indians victorious; and in fifteen minutes we remained sole masters of the field, the Indians who could having fled to the hills above. ”

“ And by a singular transition, from that people to whom we looked for the greatest amount of sympathy and encouragement we obtained the least. More than half a century before the war was commenced by the South for the defence of slavery, and joined in and prosecuted by the North in part, at least, for its destruction, a great law lord had announced from the bench that the air of England was so pure that slavery could not exist for a moment in that favored land, and that upon touching English soil the shackles would fall from the limbs of the slave, and he must stand forth a free man. ”

“ To be sure the people who usually get into a novel would decline an engagement with such meagre stage accessories. There would have to be, at least, a pistol for the hero to shoot his rival with, a light-gray powder for somebody to put into a glass of wine, and the revelation of some fearful mystery in the closing chapter. But Miss Thackeray's characters are as simple and natural as the circumstances by which they are surrounded. If she has a theory to delineate by character, it is that of self-abnegation. ”

“ Schloss Petershagen was built when stone-cutting, stone-masonry, and architecture in general, were flourishing: this (north) side of the building exhibits traces of great, but fast-decaying beauty. The long, balustraded galleries and heavy, carved cornices seem to frown darkly on the crowd of plebeian children at play on the green brink, near their father's fishing-nets; and the old tower above looks as though it felt deeply the humiliation of having been "taken down a peg," and brought under the same roof with the rest of the building, in 1828. ”

“ Generation after generation of civilized men has grown up, and lived, and passed away, in the flourishing cities of Nicaragua and Guatemala; commerce and learning have lent their aid to their development; the golden treasure of the mines has poured wealth upon them; the war- vessels and merchant - galleons of Spain have sailed up and down the San Juan, and over the waters of the great lake, for century after century, and still the foot of the explorer has scarcely penetrated into the narrow strip of country that separates that lake from the Atlantic. ”

“ The chief merit in a work of fiction —skill, or even cleverness in the development of plot —is of course out of the reach of this class of novelists; development of character is hardly more within their grasp—or only to the most patient, clear-sighted, and skillful—for we necessarily come upon scenes and characters with which we are at least partly familiar, and while historic interest demands external truth, the fictitious interest also demands a certain verisimilitude to what we might conceive to be the actual experience of characters endowed with given qualities. ”