Various

“ Looking up, looking down, around, behind, or before, discernest thou, if it be not in Mayfair alone, any idle hero, saint, god, or even devil? Not a vestige of one. 'In the heavens, in the earth, in the waters under the earth, is none like unto thee.' Thou art an original figure in this creation, a denizen in Mayfair alone. One monster there is in the world: the idle man. What is his 'religion?' That nature is a phantasm, where cunning, beggary, or thievery, may sometimes find good victual. ”

“ How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river, there it runs and flows;—draining off the sour festering water gradually from the root of the remotest glass-blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear-flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small. Labour is life! ”

“ Faith! ye lack faith! cries this prophet in our streets; and when reproved and distressed scepticism enquires where truth is to be found, he bids it back to the loom or the forge, to its tools and its workshop, of whatever kind these may be—there to forget the enquiry.
The religion, or, if he pleases, the formula of religion, which helps to keep men sober and orderly, Mr Carlyle despises, ridicules; "old clothes!" he cries, empty and ragged. It is not till a man has risen into frenzy, or some hot fanaticism, that he deserves his respect. ”

“ The veneration with which we gaze even on insensate walls which once formed the loved abode of genius and virtue, is a natural tribute to a noble nature, and flows from one of the purest and most sustaining sources of emotion by which our humanity is distinguished. It almost looks as if, in accordance with the Platonic philosophy, there remained to man, from an original and more lofty state of existence, some dim remembrance of perfection. ”

“ Such are the results for nations, when they betray to the whole world an aristocracy bankrupt of honour, emasculated, and slothful. Spoliators so reckless as Napoleon, are not always at hand for taking advantage of this domestic ruin; but it is impossible that a nation, absolutely rich as Spain was in the midst of her relative poverty, can advertise itself for centuries as a naked, defenceless waif, having neither leaders nor principles for organizing a resistance, but that eventually she will hear of a customer for her national jewels. ”

“ I enquired.
"I shall publish in a fortnight," answered Jack.
"A whole novel? Three volumes?"
"Six, if you like—or a dozen. I'm not at all particular."
"But on what subject?"
"Why, what a simpleton you must be! There is but one subject for a novel—historical, philosophical, fashionable, antiquarian, or whatever it calls itself. The whole story, after all, is about a young man and a young woman—he all that is noble, and she all that is good. Every circulating library consists of nothing whatever but Love and Glory—and that shall be the name of my novel." ”

“ The army will be the peasant, the weaver, the trader, the student, the whole of the pacific multitude of life turned into the materials of war; the ten thousand rills that silently water the plain of society suddenly united into one 17inundation; the eyes of every man looking only for the enemy; the feet of every man pursuing him; the hands of every man slaying him. The insolence of the Frenchman has contrived to convey a sting of the bitterness of conquest into every heart of our millions, and our millions will return it with resistless retribution. ”

“ In the midst of all this ignorance, with our one opera, our anthems, madrigals, glees, and ballads, we nevertheless esteem ourselves a musical people, and every one is ready to exclaim with Bottom, "I have a reasonable good ear in musick!" Music certainly is the fashion now, and no one would dare to avow that he had no music in his soul. It may be thought, that none but a people passionately devoted to music, could produce a succession of patriots ready to sacrifice health and wealth, rather than their countrymen should fail to possess an Italian opera. ”

“ How many bitter endurances, reflected from the bosom of the past, are ever mingling with all those ongoings of human life and action which we call enjoyments! How mixed in their effects are even the natural glories of this our fair creation! What golden sunset casts not its far-beaming splendour, not only on the great mountains and the glittering sea, but also breaks, as if in mockery, into ghastly chambers where the desolation of death, "the wages of sin," is miserably brooding! ”

“ It happened that a French regiment of cuirassiers, with the fine clangour of its drums and trumpets, was passing under the window at the moment.
"You see there," said he, "the kind of feeling which that really striking show produces; not a window is open but our own. The blinds of every window have been let down, not an eye looks at these troops. Yet the public of Vienna are extravagantly fond of display in all its shapes; and punchinello, or a dance of dogs, would bring a head to every pane of glass, from the roof to the ground. The French are individually shrunk from, hated, abhorred. ”

“ In what a magnificent world do we live! What power, what depth, what expanse, lay before me! How singular, too, that while the grandeur of the land arises from bold irregularity and incessant change of aspect, from the endless variety of forest, vale, and mountain; the same effect should be produced on the ocean by an absence of all irregularity and all change! A simple, level horizon, perfectly unbroken, a line of almost complete uniformity, compose a grandeur that impresses and fills the soul as powerfully as the most cloud-piercing Alp, or the Andes clothed with thunder. ”

“ There is in this poor Pope, and his practice of the scenic theory of worship, a frankness which I rather honour. Not half and half, but with undivided heart, does he set about worshipping by stage machinery; as if there were now, and could again be, in nature no other. He will ask you, What other? Under this my Gregorian chant, and beautiful wax-light phantasmagory, kindly hidden from you is an abyss of black doubts, scepticism, nay, sans-culottic Jacobinism, an orcus that has no bottom. ”

“ There may be genius in reading well quite as certainly as in writing well; nor is it any common or inferior ability that detects at a glance, amongst a multitude of facts, the one which has real significance, and which gives its character to the scene to be reviewed. If any one wishes to convince himself how much a man of genius may see in the page which can hardly obtain the attention of an ordinary reader, the last work of Mr Carlyle, Past and Present, will afford him an opportunity of making the experiment. ”

“ These have been our preceptors in the art of song, and to them, and them alone, are we indebted for our knowledge of the singer's, powers; and but for their guidance and instruction, our native home-taught professors would have been centuries instead of years behind. It may, however, be some consolation to reflect, that we have not been alone in our pupilage; for Italy, herself the pupil of ancient Greece, has in her turn become the preceptress of the modern world in music, as well as the other branches of the fine arts, in all of which her supremacy has been universally acknowledged. ”

“ What immense shapes of animal and vegetable life may fill those boundless pastures and plains on which man shall never look! What herds, by thousands and millions, of those mighty creatures whose skeletons we discover, from time to time, in the wreck of the antediluvian globe! What secrets of form and power, of capacity and enjoyment, may exist under the cover of that mighty expanse of waves which fills the bed of the ocean, and spreads round the globe! ”

“ Before us lay an apparently interminable cypress swamp, behind us a sheet of water, formed by the junction of the two creeks, and at present overhung by a mass of smoke that concealed the horizon from our view. From time to time there was a burst of flame that lit up the swamp, and caused the cypress-trees to appear as if they grew out of a sea of fire.
"Come," said the old Yankee, "we must get on. It is near sunset, and we have far to go."
"And which way does our road lie?" I asked.
"Across the cypress swamp, unless you'd rather go round it."
"The shortest road is the best," said Carleton. ”

“ Let there be a haughty nobility, void of popular sympathies, such as the haute noblesse of Russia or Hungary is sometimes said to be, and it will be possible that jealousy on behalf of privileges should operate so noxiously as to place such a body in opposition to the people for the sake of what it holds separately, rather than in sympathy with the people for the sake of what both hold in common. With us, this is otherwise; the very highest and most feudal amongst our nobles are associated by common rights, interests, and subjection to the laws, with the general body of the people. ”

“ Both the nobility and gentry of this country stand upon a basis so entirely peculiar, that, were it for that cause only, we could not greatly wonder at the perverse misconstructions upon these institutions so prevalent abroad. Indeed the peculiarity of our aristocracy is so effectual for obscurity, that we also, as a nation, are ignorant upon much which marks it characteristically; our own ignorance partly explains, and partly has caused, the continental ignorance. Could it, indeed, be expected that any people should be sensible of their own peculiarities as peculiarities? ”

“ We, therefore, cannot be supposed to arrogate for the nobility any separate privilege of patriotism. But still we venture to affirm, that, if the total numbers of our nobility and their nearest connexions were summed; and if from that sum were subtracted all officers, being brothers, sons, nephews, of British peers, who laid down their lives, or suffered incurable wounds in the naval or military service of their country, the proportion will be found greater than that upon the aggregate remainder belonging to the rest of the nation. Life is the same blessing for all ranks alike. ”

“ It is as the tranquil elegance of the Venus of the Tribune, or the calm dignity of the Apollo of the Vatican, contrasted with the nervous energy of the works of Buonarroti, or the sublime but fearful agony of the Laocoon.
The more enthusiastic admirers of the productions of the Germans, that race of musical Michael Angelos, often despise the lamer attributes of the music of the "sweet south." Such spirits delight in the storm and the whirlwind; peace and repose have probably no charms for them. ”

“ We are rushing swiftly on the road to destruction; every hour bringing us nearer, until it be, in some measure, done. The doing of it is not doubtful; only the method or the costs! Nay, I will even mention to you an infallible sifting-process, whereby he that has ability will be sifted out to rule amongst us, and that same blessed aristocracy of talent be verily, in an approximate degree, vouchsafed us by-and-by; an infallible sifting-process; to which, however, no soul can help his neighbour, but each must, with devout prayer to heaven, help himself. ”

“ I pretend to no philosophy, and have never desired to die before my time. But it was absolutely not so much the dread of finishing my career, as of the manner in which it must be finished there, which made the desperate anxiety of a struggle which I would not undergo again for the throne of the Mogul. Still, even with the roar of the water on one side, and of the rabble on the other, I had some presentiment that I should yet live to hang some of my pursuers. At all events I determined not to give my body to be torn to pieces by savages, and my name to be branded as a runaway and a poltron. ”

“ The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully. Johnson, in the eighteenth century, all as a man of letters, was, in good truth, 'the bravest of the brave.' What mortal could have more to war with? Yet, as we saw, he yielded not, faltered not; he fought, and even, such was his blessedness, prevailed. Whoso will understand what it is to have a man's heart, may find that, since the time of John Milton, no braver heart had beat in any English bosom than Samuel Johnson now bore. ”

“ In such Dynamics it is that Mr Carlyle deals. To speak in our own plain common-place diction, it is to the elements of all religious feeling, to the broad unalterable principles of morality, that he addresses himself; stirring up in the minds of his readers those sentiments of reverence to the Highest, and of justice to all, even to the lowest, which can never utterly die out in any man, but which slumber in the greater number of us. It is by no means necessary to teach any peculiar or positive doctrine in order to exert an influence on society. ”

“ It is, O friends! that all of us, that many of us, should acquire the true eye for talent, which is dreadfully wanting at present.
"'For example, you, Bobus Higgins, sausage-maker on the great scale, who are raising such a clamour for this aristocracy of talent, what is it that you do, in that big heart of yours, chiefly in very fact pay reverence to? Is it to talent, intrinsic manly worth of any kind, you unfortunate Bobus? The manliest man that you saw going in a ragged coat, did you ever reverence him; did you so much as know that he was a manly man at all, till his coat grew better? ”