Various

“ Human hearts all vibrate in harmony to one chord: in the good this sympathy is ready; in the bad it is dulled; but never while life and hope remain, can the silver chord be said to be cut. And so it is, that the same image of the forlorn, which, as affecting any that we love, appeals at once to the deep wells of compassion, will cause the same feeling of compassion to thrill with the remotest stragglers of the family of Adam. It is not a matter of reasoning, but an instinct. ”

“ You may any day see, at some of our gigantic iron-works, custom bringing men to such a pass, that they can endure to stand before a fire that would be the death and cooking of an ox. And so I suppose it was by force of custom that we were able to undergo a style of thing that ought to have been the stewing of any ordinary flesh and blood. But it was a stupid and languid life that we were leading, scarcely venturing on deck even beneath the awning, and not dreaming of shore except quite in the evening. ”

“ In this damp and uncertain climate of ours, just consider how many days there are in the course of the year, when the ladies and the children of a family cannot stir out of doors, not even into the gardens; and then think of what a comfort it would be to have a dry and airy and elegant promenade and place of exercise within their own walls. Then the children may scamper about, if it be, a proper cloister external to the house, and make that joyous noise which is so essential to their health, without any fear of annoying even the most nervous of mammas. ”

“ A still more humanising portion of their tastes is their passion for music. The guitar is heard in every house. Father, mother, and child are all playing and singing; and, to the praise of their taste be it spoken, playing nothing but the fandangoes, seguidillas, and ballads of Spain; the truest, purest, and most touching of all music; well worth all the hammered harmonies of the German school, and all the long-winded and laborious bravuras of the Italian. The Spanish music is the most refined, and yet the most natural, in the world. ”

“ He is possessor of a magnificent palace, where no noise from without ever penetrates, and where immense riches have collected together all the wonders of luxury. Marble baths, lovely gardens bounded by a sparkling sea, and vaulted by an indigo sky, legions of slaves, who have no will but his, no law but his caprices; and in this Eden three or four hundred women chosen from out of the most beautiful in the universe; this is the world, this is the life of that man: and yet, although he be so young, all who know him say that the present Sultan is morose, sad, and splenetic. ”

“ There is a world of wild romance and thrilling adventure in the occasional glimpses of the whale fishery afforded us in Omoo; a strange picturesqueness and piratical mystery about the lawless class of seamen engaged in it. Such a portrait gallery as Typee makes out of the Julia's crew, beginning with Chips and Bungs, the carpenter and cooper, the "Cods," or leaders of the forecastle, and descending until he arrives at poor Rope Yarn, or Ropey, as he was called, a stunted journeyman baker from Holborn, the most helpless and forlorn of all land-lubbers, the butt and drudge of the ship's company! ”

“ One cannot pass through this fair valley without feeling that it is destined to become, sooner or later, the happy home of civilised men, with their bleating flocks, and their lowing herds—with their schools and their churches—with their full garners, and their social hearths. At the time of our visit, the great obstacle in the way of so blessed a consummation was the hopeless wilderness to the eastward, which seemed to bar for ever the march of settlement and cultivation, but which will soon be an open road to the far west with all its riches. ”

“ But there was something in the emotion with which they spoke of him, that betokened a sense of fellowship, beyond what men of such differing creeds are apt to feel for a travelling stranger. They spoke of sitting up with him at night, giving him his medicine, and weeping for him, when there remained no room for active solicitude. The idea of dying amidst strangers in a foreign land, with no familiar face at the bed-side, is a desolation whose thought cannot pass over the spirit without beclouding its sunniness. ”

“ There is in the sight of helpless suffering a power to disarm human ferocity. And if that be the gentlest death-pillow that is breathed upon by the prayer and lighted by the eye of family love, depend upon it that far from the ungentlest is that, whose presence has brought to rude and rough natures the putting off of their roughness, and the recognising of the sweet faculty of compassion. ”

“ A fetid stench arose from the damp gutters, where neither air nor light have ever penetrated, where corruptions of all sorts amass, and where one is continually in danger of stepping upon a dead dog or rat. Such is without exaggeration the aspect of the greater part of the streets of Constantinople, and in particular those of Galata. This contrast between the misery of what surrounds you, and the incomparable beauty of the same spot when seen from a distance, has never yet been sufficiently remarked upon by travellers who seek to describe Constantinople. ”

“ It is absurd for any of the worthy members of that truly noble and generous class of men, to try to erect reminiscences of Italy, or any other southern clime, amid their own "tall ancestral groves" at home, here in old England. They have every right in the world to inhabit the palaces of Italy, which many a needy owner is glad to find them tenanting; they cannot but admire the noble proportions, the solid construction, the magnificent decorations, which meet their eyes on every side, whether at Genoa, at Verona, at Venice, at Florence, or at Rome. ”

“ We are fond of what is agreeable to the eye as well as pleasant to the taste, and therefore we love to have our bread made of the whitest and finest of the wheat. Attaching superior excellence to what thus pleases the eye, we call the good Scotch bannock an inferior food, and the wholesome black bread of the north of Europe a disgusting article of diet. ”

“ They delighted themselves in adorning their beautiful island with the artifices which money can command to the decorating of nature. At present a mass of ruins defaces that lovely spot. One is disposed to wonder that the Turks have never been at the pains to clear away the wreck of the town, if only for the sake of removing the monument of their cruelty. Mere selfish motives might induce them to be at that pains, and to restore this island to its former fitness for the habitations of the rich. ”

“ CONSTANTINOPLE AND THE DECLINING OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE. (BEING A FEW PAGES FROM MY EASTERN DIARY) .
----At half-past seven in the evening, we left Smyrna by the Scamandre, a French government steamer, and were soon gliding over a sea smooth as glass. The soft tints of the twilight spread gradually around us, and to a beautiful day there succeeded one of those marvellous nights, during which one cannot bring one's-self to the determination of retiring to rest. ”

“ Joy, my sweet Sirmio, for thy master's sake,
Make merry, frolic wavelets of my lake—
Laugh on me, all ye stores of home-bred laughter.
Gratian.—I don't like "the mind throws its burden:" lays it down is better—there is more weariness in it. You must alter that expression, or we see the mind like the "iniquæ mentis ascellus," dropping back its ears, and throwing its not agreeable and easy-sitting rider. Why not—
"When the mind lays its burden down, to come?" ”

“ The doctor, especially, was anxious to be off to Tamai, an inland village on the borders of a lake, where the fruits were the finest, and the women the most beautiful and unsophisticated in all the Society Islands. Epicurean Long Ghost had set his mind upon visiting this terrestrial paradise, and thither his steady chum willingly accompanied him. It was a day's journey on foot, allowing time for dinner and siesta; and the path lay through wood and ravine, unpeopled save by wild cattle. About noon they reached the heart of the island, thus pleasantly described. ”

“ In France, La Reine Pomarée was looked upon as a far more interesting personage than Spanish Isabel or Portuguese Maria; and extraordinary notions were formed as to the appearance, habits, and attributes of her dusky majesty. Distance favoured delusion, and French imagination ran riot in conjecture, until the reports of the valiant Thonars, and his squadron of protection, dissipated the enchantment, and reduced Pomaree to her true character, that of a lazy, dirty, licentious, Polynesian savage, who walks about barefoot, drinks spirits, and hen-pecks her husband. ”

“ Numbers of women, covered with white dominos, advance slowly and spectre-like through the crowd, which every now and then opens its ranks to give passage to some mounted Pasha, followed by his attendants on foot. Here and there may be seen asses loaded with bales, and at the further end of the galleries are caravans of camels. One's ears are deafened with the piercing cries of the sherbet-sellers, and the howling of the dogs; while quantities of pigeons coo over the heads of the motley crowd. ”

“ Surely the ragged and disreputable mutineer of the Julia, whose foot had scarcely touched the gangway, when he was hurried into confinement below, could have had scanty opportunity for such observations: unless, indeed, Herman Melville, or Typee, or the Rover, or by whatever other alias he be known, instead of creeping in at the hawse-holes, was welcomed on the quarter-deck and admitted to the gun-room, or to the commodore's cabin, an honoured guest in broad-cloth, not a despised merchant seaman in canvass frock and hat of tarpaulin. ”

“ What chance have ignorant people witnessing such attacks, or being themselves the subjects of them, of escaping the persuasion that they mark the immediate agency of the Holy Spirit? Or, to take ordinarily informed and sober-minded people,—what would they think at seeing mixed up with this hysteric disturbance, distinct proofs of extraordinary perceptive and anticipatory powers, such as occasionally manifest themselves as parts of trance, to the rational explanation of which they might not have the key? ”

“ He hastened to change the aspect and surface of things, deluding himself into the idea that he had metamorphosed an Asiatic people into a European state. Hurried away by the desire of innovation, and at the same time cramped by the effects of a religion which resists all progress, striving in vain to make the precepts of the Koran compatible with civilisation, Mahmood moved during the whole of his reign within a fatal circle, and, dying of an ignoble malady, he left his empire tottering to its fall. ”

“ Fortunately hydrophobia is unknown in the Levant.
The bazars of Constantinople have been so often described that it would be useless to describe them at any length. I will merely observe, therefore, that though infinitely more considerable, they do not respond, any more than those of Smyrna, to the ideas of luxury and grandeur which untravelled Europeans are apt to conceive of them. The Turkish bazars have a miserable aspect; they are nothing more than an immense labyrinth of large vaulted galleries, clumsily built, and at all times damp in the extreme. ”

“ The present is one in which any thing which can be said in favour of the less-valued parts of our imperial grain, will be more readily listened to than at any other period in the life-time of the existing generation; and being listened to, may be productive of the greatest national good.
I propose, therefore, to show, in an intelligible manner, that whole meal flour is really more nourishing, as well as more wholesome, than fine white flour as food for man.
The solid parts of the human body consist, principally, of three several portions: the fat, the muscle, and the bone. ”

“ In California the herds of cattle, and the sale of their hides and tallow, offer so easy a subsistence, that the population think of no other, and in consequence are poor, degenerate, and dwindling. Their whole education consists in bullock hunting. In this view, unjust and violent as may be the aggressions of the American arms, it is difficult to regret the transfer of the territory into any hands which will bring these fine countries into the general use of mankind, root out a race incapable of improvement, and fill the hills and valleys of this mighty province with corn and man. ”

“ Now, of course a man may make a fire-place as big as Soyer's great range at Crockford's—poor dear Crocky's, before it was reformed—and he may burn a sack of coals at a time in it; and he may have one of these in each apartment and lobby of his house—and a pretty warm berth he will then have of it; but it would be no thanks to his architect that he should thus be forced to encourage his purveyor of the best Wallsend. No: either let him see that the walls are of a good substantial thickness—none of the thin, hollow, badly set, sham walls of the general run of builders ”

“ Come, good courage! During the hunt, keep by her stirrup, and be as gallant as you can. But what the devil's the matter with you? Are you ill? You make as long a face as a preacher at the stake. Morbleu! cheer up, man!'
"'I have no great fancy to hunt to-day,' said Bernard; 'and I would rather—'
"'If you do not hunt,' whispered Vaudreuil, 'Comminges will think you are afraid.'
"'I am ready,' said Mergy, passing his hand across his burning brow, and resolved to wait till after the hunt to inform his brother of his adventure. ”

“ Any one who knows the service, knows that an officer accustomed to command a particular boat, if he be a good fellow, acquires a strong fellow-feeling for and with his men. This is but human nature, seeing that they are subject to frequent and long isolations from the rest of the ship's company. I have felt this influence strongly myself, and am persuaded that a sailor is never so amiable a being as when away from his ship and from civilisation, on some scrambling boat-expedition. ”