Various

“ And the soft whispering air comes stealing about Menie, with all its balmy gentle touches, like a troop of fairy comforters; and the darkness comes down with gracious speed, to hide her as she crouches, with her head upon her hands, overcome and mastered;—once, and never more.
Now it is night. Yonder the lights are glimmering faintly in the cottage windows of the Brigend. Far away above the rest, shines a little speck of light from the high window of Burnside, where once was Menie Laurie’s chamber—her land of meditation, her sanctuary of dreams. ”

“ The goodman is thrashing to-day; you can hear the heavy tramp of the horses, the swing of the primitive machine: it is almost the only sound that breaks the silence of the place.
Nay, listen—there is another sound; a slow monotonous voice, wont to excite in Jenny certain sentiments the reverse of peaceable. The kitchen door is open, a great umbrella rests against the lintel, and Miss Janet’s tall figure is just visible, in a gown not much unlike Jenny’s own, standing before the fire listening, as Jenny, arrested at the threshold, must be content to listen too. ”

“ These lamentations fall like so many tears on Jenny’s way—and she is rapidly climbing the brae, as she utters them, towards the house of Crofthill.
It is a wintry autumn afternoon—so dull, that the potato-gatherers in the fields are chilled into silence, and the ploughmen scarcely can whistle into the heavy atmosphere which droops upon them laden with unfallen rain. The paths of the little triangular garden of Crofthill are choked with masses of brown leaves, fallen from the trees, which sway their thin remaining foliage drearily, hanging lank from the crest of the hill. ”

“ The Chinese empire belongs to the ancient—indeed, we ought to say to the primitive, world. It has long survived the empires of Egypt and Assyria, and the kingdoms of ancient India,—yet it is with these States alone that the isolated civilisation of China can fairly be compared. Like them, China has reared a civilisation for herself, without any help from without. Throughout her unparalleled existence of more than forty centuries, she has been a world to herself. No influx of new ideas, no inspection of other civilisation than her own, has been granted to her. ”

“ From her window Menie Laurie looks out upon this scene—upon the darkness around—the one spot of light, and the half-illuminated faces; looks out wistfully, straining her eyes into the night, wondering where he has gone, and getting time now, as her agitation calms, to be ashamed and annoyed at her own weakness. Very calm for many a day has been Menie Laurie’s quiet heart—soberly, happily contented, and at rest. Little comforts and elegancies, which neither Mrs Laurie’s income nor Jenny’s kye could attain, Menie has managed to collect into this little room. ”

“ Asking so often, you make your cheek pale, Menie Laurie; you make your eyelids droop heavy and leaden over your dim eyes. Few people come here to break the solitude, and we all dwell with our own thoughts, through these still days, alone.
“Menie, you are injuring yourself; we will take a long walk, and see some people to-day,” said Mrs Laurie. “Come, it is quite mild—it will do us both good; we will go to the manse to see Miss Johnston, and then to Woodlands and Burnside. ”

“ Architecture, sculpture, and the arts of decoration and design, all contribute their attractions; massing, grouping, and colouring, add their effects upon the intelligent eye, while the heart is touched by the mementoes of the past which here and there arrest his glance, the grateful homage to the departed which the monumental statuary exhibits, the love of country breathing from brief but frequent inscriptions, and over all the love and veneration of both king and people for the Great Frederick, the founder of the Prussian fortunes. ”

“ Courage, Menie Laurie! If your hand falters, they will see it; if a single tear of all this unshed agony bursts forth, your mother’s heart will be overwhelmed with pain and wonder—your little friend’s with dismay. This is best—to look at the child and go on—though little Jessie has much ado to keep from weeping when she meets, with her startled face, the great gloom and darkness of Menie’s eye. ”

“ It is the barbaric lust of territorial extension, the rude fervour of fanaticism, the sensual dream of luxury to be captured in the South;—in one word, it is the same spirit that animated the hordes of an Attila or Gengis Khan that now spreads its contagion among the Russians. They move, too, like an inert mass. There is no individual life in them, that culminating phase of civilisation,—no spontaneous and self-reliant action in the units of the mass. ”

“ Travelling with his face towards the east, is one wayfarer on this lonely road. He knows the way, but it is long to his unaccustomed feet; and he is like to be benighted, whatever speed he makes. The sky before him is cold and clear, the sky of an autumn night, gleaming itself with an intense pale lustre, while great mountain-heaps of clouds, flung upon it, stand out round and full against its glittering chilly light ”

“ This peat, at the depth of fifty feet below the surface, swarms at this moment with infusorial life. Countless myriads of microscopic animals, at this great depth, beneath the pressure of the superincumbent earth and streets, live and die in the usual course of microscopic life. They move among each other, and wriggle, to human sense, invisible; so that the whole mass of peaty matter is in a state of constant and usually insensible movement. But in Berlin the houses crack at times, and yawn and suffer unaccountable damage, even where the foundations seem to have been laid with care. ”

“ The affairs of this life are ever uppermost in the mind of a Chinese; and long life, wealth, and male children, are the great objects of desire. Nothing is regarded with so much horror as death—gloomy death, after which their souls go to wander cheerless among the genii; and strange to say, the elixir of life seems to have been more generally and more perseveringly sought after in reasoning and materialistic China than among the most spiritual and imaginative nations of mankind. ”

“ From this dark raftered threatening roof which catches your first glance, you look down to the mother by the fire with her unpretending look of gentlewoman—to the daughter’s graceful head bending over her work—to pretty little Jessie here with her flutter of extreme stillness, looking at the grey walls and sober thatch without. You would never think to surprise such a group within; and yet, when you look at them again, there is something of nobleness in the primitive cottage where these women have come to live independent and unpitied—come down in the world—very true ”

“ There is no one else upon the road. The night, and the hills, and Menie Laurie, look up through the silence to heaven—and no one knows the conflict that is waging—none is here with human voice or hand to help the struggle. Fought and won—lie still in her religious breast, oh heart! Fittest way to win your quiet back again, Menie Laurie has laid you down—come good or evil, come peace or contest—laid you down once for all at the feet of God. ”

“ She has grown up like a Crusoe and his children and grandchildren, upon a solitary island,—forced ever to compare themselves by themselves, and never enjoying the rare privilege, and help to improvement, to “see ourselves as others see us.” We Europeans of the present day—in this age of “running to and fro upon the earth”—are privileged to behold the endless variety of life, manners, and institutions with which the world is stored—to judge of them by their several effects, as revealed in the pages of history, and to draw from them their moral ”

“ They move, not by virtue of an innate and self-directing force, but are swayed to and fro by the will of their Czar, as vastly and unresistingly as the slumbrous mass of ocean beneath the influence of the moon. They press southwards from their northern homes as the vast torpid mass of the glacier gravitates from its cradle in the snows, crushing its slow way down to the plain, and spreading a cold blight around in valleys that once bore the vine. ”

“ Another great tear; no one knows so well what an imp this said little Davie is—but Jessie sighs again. “It was a’ me.”
But it is not this little cloud of childish trouble that throws a something of pensive sadness into Jessie’s pictured face. The face is the face before you; but the atmosphere, Menie Laurie, is in your own heart. Something sad—touched with that sweet pathos which lies on the surface of all great depths—and this true picture grows under Menie’s hand to a heroic child.
It is a strange place for an artist to be. ”

“ Few strangers visit the city who have not heard of the man, and who do not feel gratified to have seen his likeness in his bust. Fewer, whose love of books has carried them to the royal library, have not in silence looked, and with a melancholy interest, on the chair in which he sat when the death-stroke came upon him, and at the book which he was still holding in his hand when the sudden summons came.
Bursting its old boundaries, like Hamburg, Brunswick, Breslau, and many other fortified cities, the walls and ditches and towers of Hanover are gradually disappearing. ”

“ In regard to slaves, the code metes out less equal justice; but a like one-sidedness has defaced the legislation of every country—and slavery, as it exists in China, is infinitely milder than anywhere else either in the East or West. It is not superior humanity and generosity which occasions this difference: it results from the social condition of the nation. Slavery is the apprenticeship which, in one shape or another, uncivilised man has had to undergo in all countries before becoming capable of sustained industry and self-government. ”

“ Every unit of Chinese society is homogeneous. The whole population are one—in blood, sentiments, and language;—and hence it contains none of those discordant elements, those unwillingly-yoked parts, which proved the destruction of the old “universal empires,” and which are destined ere long to annihilate the present territorial system of Europe. China, in fact, has ever been, and is, what European Germany and Slavonia, and every other great State of the future will be—a Race-Empire;—and therefore indestructible. ”

“ I really believe that there is no country in the world where the agricultural population are better off than they are in the north of China. Labour with them is pleasure, for its fruits are eaten by themselves, and the rod of the oppressor is unfelt and unknown.... For a few cash (1000 or 1200 cash = 1 dollar) a Chinese can dine in a sumptuous manner upon his rice, fish, vegetables, and tea; and I fully believe that in no country in the world is there less real misery and want than in China. The very beggars seem a kind of jolly crew, and are kindly treated by the inhabitants. ”

“ No ideal, noble, and glorious, such as a heart might make for itself—no human idol either, arrayed in the purple and gold of loving homage—and the heart of Randall, startled and dismayed, hides its face, and beholds itself for the first time truly. ”

“ On his war steed there he rides, the iron man, the observed of all eyes, surrounded, it is true, by the generals who rose to fame beneath his banner, but not less conspicuously by the statesmen who led his civil armies, by the poets and great writers whom he esteemed and imitated, by the advancers of science in his time, and by those who ornamented his reign through the decorations of the fine arts,—all here find their place side by side, attendant upon the great monarch, at once giving and receiving lustre. ”

“ It is not very easy to comprehend the exact creed and method of the new school of poets, who have set themselves to work upon a principle hitherto unknown, or at all events unproclaimed. This much we know from themselves, that they regard poetry not only as a sacred calling, but as the most sacred of any—that, in their opinion, every social relation, every mundane tie, which can interfere with the bard’s development, must be either disregarded or snapped asunder—and that they are, to the fainting race of Adam, the sole accredited bearers of the Amreeta cup of immortality. ”

“ The dress and manners of the people, especially in the markets, their habits and tastes, as indicated by the articles everywhere exposed for sale, and especially the quaint old Gothic and curiously-ornamented houses, which range their gables here and there along the streets—these attractions interest even the keenest lovers of progress. Old-world times come up on the memory with all their associations, and by dint of contrast awaken trains of thought not the less pleasant that they are totally different from those which railways and their accompaniments are continually suggesting to us. ”

“ To the character and tendencies of this race we owe the centralising influence which has given power to our democratic institutions. We owe to them the principle of honour, courtesy to women, social disinterestedness, and the many virtues which have grown out of the system of chivalry. In art, we owe to them the great system of ecclesiastical architecture, which, after slumbering for a couple of centuries, is now flourishing in so remarkable a revival, that every genuine vestige of it is preserved with pious care ”

“ The road ascends a little, and looks from this point as if it went abruptly into the skies; and on either side lies the low breadth of a peat-moss, on which it is too dark now to distinguish the purple patches of heather, or anything but the moorland burn and deep drain full of black clear water, from which is thrown back again, in long flying glimmers of reflection, the pale light of the sky.
There is not a house in sight. ”