Various

“ It is a day for lovers. The earth is bathed in light, and southerly breezes, such as revive the dying and cheer their heavy hours with promises of amendment and recovery, temper the fire that streams from the unclouded sun. In the garden of the cottage, in a secluded part of it, there is a summer-house—call it beauty's bower—with Margaret within—and honeysuckle, clematis, and the passion flower, twining and intertwining, kissing and embracing, around, above, below, on every side. ”

“ I am for no restraint upon the members of either sex; for if the honour, integrity, or great capacity of a fine lady should recommend her to the intimacy or confidence of a Prime Minister, in consequence of which he should get her a place—would it not be very hard that this very act of mutual friendship must render her incapable of doing either him or her country any real service in the senate-house? Is freedom consistent with restraint? or can we propose to serve our country by obstructing the natural operations of love and gratitude? ”

“ Up to this time, when Ceylon passed under our flag, it is to be observed that no progress whatever, not the least, had been made in mastering the peach-stone, that old central nuisance of the island. The little monster still crowed, and flapped his wings on his dunghill, as had been his custom always in the afternoon for certain centuries. But nothing on earth is immortal: even mighty bantams must have their decline and fall; and omens began to show out that soon there would be a dust with the new master at Columbo. ”

“ Now Margaret loved Michael as she had never loved before. Slander could not open its lying lips to speak one word against the esteem and gratitude she had ever entertained for Mildred but esteem and gratitude—I appeal to the best, the most virtuous and moral of my readers—cannot put out the fire that nature kindles in the adoring heart of woman. Her error was not that she loved Michael more, but that she had loved Mildred less. Ambition, if it usurp the rights of love, must look for all the punishment that love inflicts. ”

“ It was perhaps on the tenth day after Mildred had been deposited in the earth, that Margaret permitted the sun once more to lighten her abode. Since the death of her husband the house had been shut up—no visitor had been admitted—there had been no witness to her agony and tears. It should be so. There are calamities too great for human sympathy; seasons too awful for any presence save that of the Eternal. Time, reason, and religion—not the hollow mockery of solemn words and looks—must heal the heart lacerated by the tremendous deathblow. Abraham Allcraft had waited for this day. ”

“ The most variegated carpet of flowers I ever beheld lay unrolled before me; red, yellow, violet, blue, every colour, every tint was there; millions of the most magnificent prairie roses, tuberoses, asters, dahlias, and fifty other kinds of flowers. The finest artificial garden in the world would sink into insignificance when compared with this parterre of nature's own planting. My horse could hardly make his way through the wilderness of flowers, and I for a time remained lost in admiration of this scene of extraordinary beauty. ”

“ Our vices, which are the pastime of the drawing-room, become the bugbears of the silent bedchamber. Margaret, when she would have slept, was haunted by reproaches, which waited until then to agitate and frighten her. A sense of impropriety and sinfulness started in her bosom, and convicted her of an offence— unpardonable in her sight—against the blessed memory of Mildred. She could not deny it, Michael Allcraft had created on her heart a favourable impression—one that must be obliterated at once and for ever, if she hoped for happiness, for spiritual repose. ”

“ People have drawn a very absurd inference to the contrary, from the fact of the princess washing the clothes. That operation may have been as fashionable then as worsted work now, and clothes then were not what clothes are now—there were no Manchesters, and those things were rare and precious, handed down to generations, and given as presents of honour. You have shed tears over the beautiful, noble-hearted Iphigenia—wronged even to death. Glorious was the age that could find an Alcestis to suffer her great wrong! Such women honour human nature, and make man himself better. ”

“ Banners of all hues were waving from the casements, and borne along by the people; and in the midst of the wild procession were seen at a distance a train of travelling carriages, loaded on the roofs with the basest of the rabble. A mixed crowd of National Guards, covered with dust, and drooping under the fatigue of the road, poissardes drunk, dancing, screaming the most horrid blasphemies, and a still wider circle, which seemed to me recruited from all the jails of Paris, surrounded the carriages, which I at length understood to be those of the royal family. ”

“ If, as Wordsworth, that arch-priest of poesy, expresses it, I could place the gentle reader "atween the downy wings" of some beneficent and willing angel, in one brief instant of time should he be deposited on the little hill that first discovers the smiling, quiet village of Ellendale. He would imbibe of beauty more in a breath, a glance, than I can pour into his soul in pages of spiritless delineation. I cannot charm the eye with that great stream of liquid light, which, during the long and lingering summer's day, issues from the valley like an eternal joy ”

“ There is no end, Eusebius, to the wrongs our tongues do the sex. We take up all old, and invent new, proverbs against them. Ungenerous as we are, we learn other languages out of spite, as it were, to abuse them with, and cry out, "One tongue is enough for a woman." We rate them for every thing and at nothing—thus: "He that loseth his wife and a farthing, hath a great loss of his farthing." There's not a natural evil but we contrive to couple them with it. "Wedding and ill-wintering tame both man and beast." ”

“ By and through this neglect it is, that on the inner hearths of the Roman Catholic Irish, on the very altars of their lares and penates, burns for ever a sullen spark of disaffection to that imperial household, with which, nevertheless and for ever, their own lot is bound up for evil and for good; a spark always liable to be fanned by traitors—a spark for ever kindling into rebellion; and in this has lain perpetually a delusive encouragement to the hostility of Spain and France, whilst to her own children, it is the one great snare which besets their feet. ”

“ Dim, mystic, childish, with open mouth and staring eyes, the German sees the whole phantasmagoria of the nether world pass before him: keen, biting, sarcastic—egotistic as a beauty, and cold-hearted as Mephistopheles—the Frenchman walks among his figures in a gilded drawing room; probes their spirits, breaks their hearts, ruins their reputation, and seems to have a profound contempt for any reader who is so carried away by his power as to waste a touch of sympathy on the unsubstantial pageants he has clothed for a brief period in flesh and blood. ”

“ Margaret then played sacred airs on the piano, which Michael listened to with most unsacred feelings. Fathers and mothers! put out your children's eyes—remove their toes—cut off their fingers. Whilst with a lightning look, a hair-breadth touch, they can declare, make known the love, that, having grown too big for the young heart, is panting for a vent—you do but lose your pains whilst you stand by to seal their tremulous lips. ”

“ Great are the promises of Ceylon; great already her performances. Great are the possessions of Ceylon, far greater her reversions. Rich she is by her developments, richer by her endowments. She combines the luxury of the tropics with the sterner gifts of our own climate. She is hot; she is cold. She is civilized; she is barbarous. She has the resources of the rich; and she has the energies of the poor.
But for Taprobane, but for Paradise, we have a word of dissent. ”

“ Nature laid itself bare to me; and I perceived its immensity, by seeing the ocean of beings who were spread every where, making the whole one mass of animated matter, from the marbles up to God. It was a noble sight! In short, there was a universe in my patient. When I inserted the knife in his gangrened leg I annihilated millions of those beings. You laugh, ladies, to think you are possessed by animals. ”

“ The succession of springs which he touched, and of secret drawers which started at the touch, might have supplied a little history of Italian intrigue. At last he found the roll of papers which he sought, and having first thrown a glance round the room, as if a spy sat on every chair, he began to unroll them; with a rapid criticism on each as the few first lines met his eye. Every nerve of his countenance was in full play as he looked over those specimens of the wisdom of the wise; It would have been an invaluable study to a Laveter. ”

“ Ceylon has this one disadvantage for purposes of theatrical effect; she is like a star rising heliacally, and hidden in the blaze of the sun: any island, however magnificent, becomes lost in the blaze of India. But that does not affect the realities of the case. She has that within which passes show. Her one calamity is in the laziness of her native population; though in this respect the Kandyans are a more hopeful race than the Cinghalese. ”

“ Infants are we all in the arms of a just father! The command is from elsewhere—obedience is with us. If you would be happy, I charge you, fling away the hope of finding security or rest in laws of your own making in a system which you are pleased to call a code of honour—honour that grows cowardlike and pale in the time of trial—that shrinks in the path of duty—that slinks away unarmed and powerless, when it should be nerved and ready for the righteous battle. ”

“ Without alarm, without warning—as if at the throwing up of a rocket in the dead of night, or at the summons of a signal gun—the great capital, almost as populous as Naples or Vienna, and far more dangerous in its excitement, found itself under military possession by a little army—so perfect in its appointments as to make resistance hopeless, and by that very hopelessness (as reconciling the most insubordinate to a necessity) making irritation impossible. ”

“ And so you write to me, to supply you with some sketches from nature, instances of the "Wrongs of Woman." Ah me! Does not this earth teem with them—the autumnal winds moan with them? The miseries want a good hurricane to sweep them off the land, and the dwellings the "foul fiend" hath contaminated. Man's doing, and woman's suffering, and thence even arises the beauty of loveliness—woman's patience. In the very palpable darkness besetting the ways of domestic life, woman's virtue walks forth loveliest—
"Virtue gives herself light, through darkness for to wade." ”

“ At length, then, the entire island of Ceylon, about a hundred days before Waterloo, had become ours for ever. Hereafter Ceylon must inseparably attend the fortunes of India. Whosoever in the East commands the sea, must command the southern empires of Asia; and he who commands those empires, must for ever command the Oriental islands. One thing only remains to be explained; and the explanation, we fear, will be harder to understand than the problem: it is—how the Portuguese and Dutch failed, through nearly three centuries, to master this little obstinate nucleus of the peach. ”

“ Upon entering the room, the lover saw immediately that Graham had committed him. His easy and accustomed step had never called a blush into the maiden's cheek. Wherefore should it now? He felt the coming and the dreaded crisis already near, and that his fate was hanging on her lips. His heart fluttered, and he became slightly perturbed; but he sat down manfully; determined to await the issue. Margaret welcomed him with more restraint than was her wont, but not—he thought and hoped—less cordially. Maidens are wilful and perverse. Why should she hold her head down, as she had never done before? ”

“ But on the fields of India it is, that our aptitudes for colonization have displayed themselves most illustriously, because they were strengthened by violent resistance. We found many kingdoms established, and to these we have given unity; and in process of doing so, by the necessities of the general welfare, or the mere instincts of self-preservation, we have transformed them to an empire, rising like an exhalation, of our own—a mighty monument of our own superior civilization.
Ceylon, as a virtual dependency of India, ranks in the same category. There also we have prospered by resistance ”

“ The direct and unequivocal verdict of experience is, that the touch reveals itself to us as one of its own sensations. In the finger-points more particularly, and generally all over the surface of the body, the touch manifests itself not only as that which apprehends hardness, but as that which is itself hard. The sense of touch vested in one of its own sensations (our tangible bodies namely) is the sense of touch brought within its own sphere. It comes before itself as one sensation of hardness. ”

“ As difficult is it to convey a just impression of a peaceful spot, whose praise consists—so to speak—rather in privatives than positives; whose privilege it is to be still free, tranquil, and unmolested, in a land and in an age of ceaseless agitation, in which the rigorous virtues of our fathers are forgotten, and the land's integrity threatens to give way. If Ellendale be not the most populous and active village, it is certainly the most rustic and winning that I have ever beheld in our once merry England. ”

“ It is difficult to imagine a more dangerous companion for a young widow than Michael Allcraft was likely to prove. [pg 586] Manliness of demeanour, and a handsome face and figure, have always their intrinsic value. If you add to these a cultivated mind, a most expressive and intellectual countenance, rich hazel eyes, as full of love as fire, a warm impulsive nature, shrinking from oppression, active in kindness and deeds of real benevolence—you will not fail to tremble for my Margaret. Abraham Allcraft was too shrewd a man to allude even most remotely to the actual reason of his son's recall. ”

“ Hardness, we will say, is originally a purely subjective affection. The question, then, is, how can this affection, without being thrust forth into a fictitious, transcendent, and incomprehensible universe, assume, nevertheless, a distinct objective reality, and be (not as it were, but in language of the most unequivocating truth) a permanent existence altogether independent of the sense? We answer, that this can take place only provided the sense of touch can be brought under our notice as itself hard. ”

“ Overhead the deep blue firmament, with its hosts of bright stars; at my feet, and all around, an ocean of magical light, myriads of fire-flies floating upon the soft still air. To me it was like a scene of enchantment. I could distinguish every blade of grass, every flower, each leaf on the trees, but all in a strange unnatural sort of light, and in altered colours. Tuberoses and asters, prairie roses and geraniums, dahlias and vine branches, began to wave and move, to range themselves in ranks and rows. ”