Various

“ Certainly this Count Peschiera knew well how woman is to be wooed and won; and never was woman more sensitive to those high appeals which most move all true earnest womanhood, than was the young Violante. Fortune favoured him in the moment chosen. Harley was wrenched away from her hopes, and love a word erased from her language. In the void of the world, her father’s image alone stood clear and visible. And she who from infancy had so pined to serve that father, who had first learned to dream of Harley as that father’s friend! ”

“ The people of Ireland have a remarkable fondness for music, and Moore was a musician by nature. Of music he knew nothing as a science, but he felt its soul. The heavy harmonies of Germany—in which the chief object is to show the toil of the performer and the patience of his auditory, to press discords into the service, and to crush the very sense of pleasure—would not have been endured by the Irish, who, like all lovers of the genuine art, prefer songs to musical problems, and to be bewitched rather than be bewildered. ”

“ Endowed by nature with a gay and happy temper, fond of fun, relishing adventure, and with a fine eye for the picturesque, he ranges from the Garonne to the Rhone, from the shores of the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean marshes, from the sterile wastes of the Landes, by the splendour of the Pyrenees, to the old Roman city of Nismes—making us wish all the while that we could have made the journey in such agreeable company. As a fellow-traveller, we should be inclined to say that he errs on the score of haste. ”

“ The elder sceptic, having satisfied himself that a narrative was fabulous, threw it aside: the modern critic follows the spirit, the life of the nation, into the fable itself. He does not attempt, as the half-doubting, half-believing historian has done, to shape it at once to the measure of modern credence, by merely modifying a few of the details, reducing an extravagance, or lopping off a miracle; but, taking his stand on whatever facts remain indisputable, or whatever knowledge may be obtained from collateral sources, he investigates thoroughly the fabulous or poetic narrative. ”

“ If nature, in one of her freaks—or, let us say, if some German fairies, of an erudite species, had resolved to breed a great scholar, who should be an independent thinker—who should be devoted to books, yet retain a spirit of self-reliance—who should have all the learning of colleges without their pedantry, and read through whole libraries, and yet retain his free, unfettered right of judgment—how would they have proceeded to execute their project? Would they have thrown their little pupil at the feet of some learned professor at Bonn or Göttingen? ”

“ With a severe adherence to his original design, he works out a scene, so perfect in its parts, and so combined as a whole, that it is difficult to realise to the mind the gigantic scale, or the coarse touches, with which it is painted: you gaze on it as on a finished picture by some great artist, who has devoted months to its elaboration in the solitude of his studio; and wonder not less at the taste, and fancy, and sentiment of those extraordinary works, than at the rapidity with which they are produced, and the inexhaustible resources of the mind that gives them birth. ”

“ Why is it that certain parties are now, more than heretofore, engaged in getting up a cry for reform and extension of suffrage? Why is it that some men, ostensibly belonging to the Whig party, who, a year or two ago, held such views in utter detestation, have declared themselves favourable to the movement? Has anything been done to curtail the popular privileges—to take away from the people any portion of the power which they previously possessed—to curtail the liberty of the press—or in any way to trench upon the rights which are common to every subject? ”

“ But, then, what harm does the Hate do us? Very often the harm is as unseen by the world as the hate is unrecognised by us. It may come on us, unawares, in some solitary byway of our life; strike us in our unsuspecting privacy; thwart us in some blessed hope we have never told to another: for the moment the world sees that it is Hate that strikes us, its worst power of mischief is gone. ”

“ We can imagine the look of melancholy with which, after having finished his stanzas, Moore gave a moonlight glance to the woods and wilds, as he stood at his cottage door, and thought of the lively scenes at that moment glittering in London. Solitude may be the place of the philosopher, and universities the stronghold of science; but, for the knowledge of life, the play of character, the vigour of manly competitorship, and even the variety of views, events, and character, which make the true materials of the poetic faculty, association with our kind is indispensable. ”

“ No man you ever met in the world seemed more raised above the malice of Hate than Audley Egerton: even in the hot war of politics he had scarcely a personal foe; and in private life he kept himself so aloof and apart from others that he was little known, save by the benefits the waste of his wealth conferred. That the hate of any one could reach the austere statesman on his high pinnacle of esteem,—you would have smiled at the idea! But Hate is now, as it ever has been, an actual Power amidst “the Varieties of Life;” ”

“ Let us again look to Ireland, to see how warmly the sympathies of the peasant follow those who assume to arraign the laws of the State, and establish a wild justice of their own—how naturally they favour them, with what devotion they will screen them, and at what personal peril they will protect them; and if we have to confess that centuries have seen us vainly struggling with the secret machinery which sustains crime amongst ourselves, let us be honest enough to spare our reproaches to those who have not yet suppressed brigandage in Southern Italy. ”

“ The poet in retirement either becomes the worship of a circle of women, who pamper him with panegyric, until he degenerates into silliness; or, living alone, becomes the worse thing—a worshipper of himself. Like a garrison cut off from its supplies, he lives on short allowance of ideas; like a hermit, thinks his rags sanctity, and his nonsense Oracles; or, like Robinson Crusoe, imagines his geese conversible, and his island an empire.
It is true, that Moore suffered less from this famine of poetic food than most of his race. ”

“ Therefore, neither in Nature nor in Art can it be truly said that that power is not creative which brings into the world a new form, though all which compose a form, as all which compose a flower, a tree, a mite, an elephant, a man, are, if taken in detail, as old as the gases in the air we breathe, or the elements of the earth we tread. But the Creative Faculty in Art requires a higher power than it asks in Nature; for Nature may create things without life and mind—Nature may create dust and stones which have no other life and mind than are possessed by the animalcules that inhabit them. ”

“ Second only to the man who leads an army to rescue his country from the stranger, such a man is a patriot of the true kind, whatever the colour of his politics may be. Some poems he has written are like those exquisite ancient miniature pictures on a gold ground, best to be understood and appreciated by the educated connoisseur, while others are so plain in language and sentiment that they have sunk into the hearts of the people, and will flow for ever from the lips of the people in the shape of national songs. ”

“ Now it would evidently be the height of extravagance were you to throw away first-rate wine upon men who cannot appreciate it. Who, in the possession of his senses, would dream of feeding pigs on pine-apples? And as, in this wicked world, we are all of us occasionally compelled to give dinners to men, who, though excellent creatures in other respects, are utterly deficient in the finer sensations of our being, we cannot, for the life of us, see why they should be treated contrary to the bent of their organisation. ”

“ Idle and cursory readers, who have only heard or thought of Niebuhr as the provoking destroyer of some agreeable fictions—as the ruthless enemy of poetic and traditionary lore—will be surprised to find what a deep earnestness of conviction there was in this man, and how his enthusiasm for truth and for all virtue rises into romance. Once for all, let no man parade his love of poetry, with the least hope of being respected for it, who has not a still greater love of truth. ”

“ You have hit the exact point, my dear Mr Bulkeley, on which the eligibility of the whole affair pivots, only you must look at it from that sublimely piercing elevation from which the American intellect surveys it. Sir, we must create a population: sir, we must found cities: sir, it must be ours to people the western solitudes and to implant the germs of a nascent commerce, a new learning, a fresh community, where now the coon and the prairie dog dwell unmolested and alone: and, sir, future ages will decree to us colossal statues of imperishable brass ”

“ Is there any reflecting man in the country who does not shudder at the thought of such a consummation?—is there any one conversant with history who does not see to what it must necessarily lead? With no lack of demagogues to mislead and excite them, what part of the British fabric would be secure against the attacks of an ignorant democracy? It may be true that Lord John Russell does not contemplate this—that he would even shrink from and repudiate the thought with horror. But he is not the less doing all in his power to forward the advance of anarchy. ”

“ Thus has passed away a great poet from the world—a man whose manners added grace to every circle in which he moved—animation to the gay, and sentiment to the refined. If England holds his remains, Ireland is the heir of his fame; and if she has a sense of gratitude, she will give some public testimonial of her homage to the genius which has given another ray to the lustre of her name. ”

“ Moore’s hero was a feeble romancer; his national regenerator a street rioter; and his patriotic statesman merely a giddy gambler, who staked his pittance on a silly and solitary throw for supremacy, and saw his stake swept away by the policeman! Totally foolish as Ireland has ever been in her politics, she ought to be most ashamed of this display before the world—of inaugurating this stripling-revolutionist, this fugitive champion, this milk-and-water Jacobin, among her claims to the homage of posterity. ”

“ There is no great poetic artist, whether in narrative or the drama, who, in his best works, ever represents a literal truth rather than the idealised image of a truth—who ever condescends to servile imitations of nature—who ever prefers the selection of particulars, in the delineation of character or the conception of fable, to the expression of generals—who does not aim at large types of mankind rather than the portraiture of contemporaries—or, at least, wherever he may have been led to reject these principles, it will be in performances that are allowed to be beneath him. ”

“ Worlds must perish, suns shrivel up, matter and spirit both fall into nothingness, before the combinations whose union makes that little flame, which the breath of a babe can restore to darkness, shall lose the power to unite into light once more. ”

“ We admit that Homer is of a higher order of art than Sappho; that Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ is of a higher order of art than Shakespeare’s Sonnets; ‘Macbeth’ being purely objective—the Sonnets being the most subjective poems which the Elizabethan age can exhibit.
But it is not his choice of the highest order of art that makes a great artist. If one man says “I will write an epic,” and writes but a mediocre epic, and another man says “I will write a song,” and writes an admirable song—the man who writes what is admirable is superior to him who writes what is mediocre. ”

“ In the fixed star, in the Will-o’-the-wisp, in the great sun that illumes half a world, or the farthing rushlight by which the ragged student strains his eyes—still the same flower of the elements. Light in the universe, thought in the soul—ay—ay—Go on with the simile. ”

“ They have none of that military ardour which makes the Northern Italian proud of being a soldier. Their blood has not been stirred by seeing the foreigner the master of their capital cities; their pride has not been outraged by the presence of the hated Croat or the rude Bohemian at their gates. To them the call to arms has been anything but a matter of vain glory. Besides this, there seems in the unrelenting pursuit of the Brigandage a something that savours of the hate of the North for the South. ”

“ On the banks of the Scottish Clyde the modern voyager from the New World looks with peculiar interest on the growing fabrics of those huge steamers, with ribs of steel, and planks, not of oak, but of iron, which have made the ocean, that proved so impassable a barrier to the men of the fifteenth century, the easy highway of commerce and pleasure to us. The roar of the iron forge, the clang of the forehammer, the intermittent glare of the furnaces, and all the novel appliances of iron shipbuilding, tell of the modern era of steam ”

“ Men untrained themselves to observe, and ignorant that it is intellectual knowledge which opens and guides the eye, affect to wonder—often, indeed, do seriously wonder—that gold so plentifully scattered over the surface of a country as it is said to be in California and Australia, or sprinkling with its yellow sheen thick veins of snowy quartz, should, for a time so comparatively long, have escaped observation. ”

“ Like the Irish, the lower Italians have never regarded the law but as a harsh and cruel tyranny. They only know it in its severity and in its penalties—they have never had recourse to it for protection or defence; it has never been to them a barrier against the exactions of the great man, or the unjust pressure of the powerful man; they have felt it in its moods of vengeance, and never in its moments of commiseration. Elevated above their fellows by a certain wild and savage chivalry, the brigands have long exercised a terror over the people of the South. ”

“ We wonder whether it ever occurred to Mr Seward that if the imaginary injuries of one nation upon another are to be visited with such remote vindictiveness, it may be probable that very real and deep sufferings may leave still more indelible rancour behind them; and that there is a people at this moment not only undergoing treatment at the hands of the Union which excites the horror of civilised nations, but proving itself perfectly capable of executing future vengeance. ”

“ Do the edicts which forbid a peasant to carry more than one meal to his daily labour, tell of a more enlightened rule? Do the proclamations against being found a mile distant from home, savour of liberty? Are the paragraphs we daily read in the Government papers, where the band of this or that brigand chief has been captured or shot, the only evidences to be shown of a spirit which moves Italians to desire a united nation? You tell us of your superior enlightenment and cultivation, say the Bourbonists, and the world at large listens favourably to your claims. ”

“ Now, in reality, where genius is present, art cannot be absent. Unquestionably, genius may make many incidental mistakes in art, but if it compose a work of genius, that work must be a work of art on the whole. For just as virtue consists in a voluntary obedience to moral law, so genius consists in a voluntary obedience to artistic law. And the freedom of either is this, that the law is pleasing to it—has become its second nature. Both human virtue and human genius must err from time to time ”

“ For the docti as well as the indocti—men the most learned in all but the art of novel-writing—write novels, no less than the most ignorant; and often with no better success. One gentleman wishing to treat us with a sermon, puts it into a novel; another gentleman, whose taste is for political disquisition, puts it into a novel; High Church and Low Church and no Church at all, Tories and Radicals, and speculators on Utopia, fancy that they condescend to adapt truth to the ordinary understanding, when they thrust into a novel that with which a novel has no more to do than it has with astronomy. ”