Various

“ In the highest drawing-rooms in Europe, nay, in any peasant’s cottage of his own country, Sir Godfrey would have felt immeasurably more at ease than he then stood, hat in hand, in the attic of these Parisian work-people. He had hardly begun to address the person before him, too, as Madame, ere the child’s fretfulness in the arms of its little nurse became a vociferous squall, to which the elder woman turned her head slowly, with an air of distress, her features working, her body moving and rocking in her chair, as she made a humming, hushing sound to the infant. ”

“ I do not know what philosophy represents man as insignificant in the eyes of the Deity; and still less does religious philosophy favour the belief of man’s insignificance in the eyes of God. What great things, according to the views which religion teaches, has He done for mankind, and for each man!” [42]
But man’s intellectual and moral nature being of such dignity and value in the estimation of God, other circumstances connected with him tend in the same direction, says Dr Whewell, and point him out as a special and unique existence, in every way worthy of his transcendent position. ”

“ On the sultry evening of a burning July day, when several thousand men of the middle and lower classes should just have quitted the spectacle which excites them to the utmost, and habituates them to bloodshed, to raise, in the streets of Madrid, even the simulacre of a riotous banner, and that at a time when the people were galled by a long period of oppression and misrule, and when an insurrectionary army was in the field, was surely an act of as self-destructive madness as ever a doomed and blinded man was afflicted with. ”

“ As little as we can deprive ourselves of the human frame, can we divest our individual history of its graceful garment of place and scene. Such a thing happened, we say; but memory is no bare chronicler of facts and events, and as we say the words, the time starts up before us, with all its silent witnesses;—leaves that were shed years ago, trees cut down and gone, yet they live in our thoughts with the joy or the sorrow of which they were silent attendants. We have caught and appropriated these bits of still life—they are a part of our history, and belong to us for ever. ”

“ Yet there is one holy place where all the nations of the earth come together to worship—one country rich with a perpetual attraction. The soil thrills to the consecrating touch of love and grief; the ages of the past dwell in it as in a sanctuary. Making no account of the wandering handful of wild Asiatics who surround him, the traveller there seeks not scenes of to-day, but cities of the dead. The place has a solemn array of lofty inhabitants, undying fathers of the soil; generation after generation, conquerors, defenders, devotees, have come and gone and departed. ”

“ Strong and many are the claims made upon us by our mother Earth; the love of locality—the charm and attraction which some one homely landscape possesses to us, surpassing all stranger beauties, is a remarkable feature in the human heart. We who are not ethereal creatures, but of a mixed and diverse nature—we who, when we look our clearest towards the skies, must still have our standing-ground of earth secure—it is strange what relations of personal love we enter into with the scenes of this lower sphere. ”

“ In some degree every mind must have its own private gallery of pictures, impossible to be revealed to the vision of another,—from the homely imagination which cherishes that one bit of sunshine on its walls, “the house where I was born,” the old childish paradise and ideal, rich with such flowers and verdure as can be found in no other place, to the stately and well-furnished recollection which can roam at will through all the brightest countries in the world; but wherever we go, we weave ourselves into the landscape, and make every milestone a historical monument in the chronicle of our life. ”

“ How entire emancipation, which we trust, before long, every State in America will adopt, can be carried out, must be left to the wisdom and discretion of the local legislatures. No change so great as this can be wrought suddenly. Christianity itself must be inculcated, not coerced, for violence never yet made converts; nor was the blood-red baptism of Valverde, who held the cross in the one hand and the sword in the other, equal in efficacy to the calm expositions of Xavier. Now, it is very plain to us that, in her own way, Mrs Beecher Stowe is a zealot. ”

“ Thousands of persons who would have thought it a positive sin to indulge in the perusal of a romance by Scott or Lytton, devoured the pages of Mrs Stowe with an avidity the more intense from their habits of previous abstinence. It was a book much patronised by the Quakers, and greatly in favour among the Methodists. It was multiplied by countless editions; it was to be seen in the drawing-room of the noble, and in the humble home of the mechanic; and from men of all classes throughout Great Britain it met with a cordial acceptance. ”

“ But before we lay down the pen, we would not have it supposed that we are not sensible both of the merits and advantages of the Crystal Palace. It ought to be, and doubtless will be, the means of improving the people, and affording them rational amusement. There has been a little too much bombast about it, as a great college for the education of the mind of the people—too much eulogistic verbiage, which sickens the true source of rational admiration. It will improve, because it will amuse; for good amusement is education both for head and heart. ”

“ If man, when he attains to a knowledge of such laws, is really admitted, in some degree, to the view with which the Creator himself beholds his creation; if we can gather, from the conditions of such knowledge, that his intellect partakes of the nature of the Divine intellect; if his mind, in its clearest and largest contemplation, harmonises with the Divine mind,—we have in this a reason which may well seem to us very powerful, why, even if the earth alone be the habitation of intelligent beings, still the great work of creation is not wasted. ”

“ At this moment, find him where you will, the qualities for which the Jew is distinguished are not those which win the respect or admiration of his neighbours—he is barren and desolate like his country, and has no beauty in him. Harsh sounds and unmelodious—at the best, a wail of blind inquiry, and long suspense—are all the harp of Judah is capable of now; and till the hand of the Divine musician touch the strings, it is a vain hope that any human finger can wake them to the measure of David or of Solomon, the lofty strains of old. ”

“ One school of moral discipline, one theatre of moral action, one arena of moral contests for the highest prizes, is a sufficient centre for innumerable hosts of stars and planets, globes of fire and earth, water and air, whether or not tenanted by corals and madrepores, fishes and creeping things. So great and majestic are those names of RIGHT and GOOD, DUTY and VIRTUE, that all mere material or animal existence is worthless in the comparison.... Man’s moral progress is a progress towards a likeness with God ”

“ In the Dialogue, an objector suggests, “But in your inclination to make man the centre of creation, and the object of all the rest of the universe, are you not forgetting the admonitions of those who warn us against this tendency of self-glorification? You will recollect how much of this warning there is in the Essay on Man:—
‘Ask for what end the heavenly bodies shine?
Earth for whose use? Pride answers, ’Tis for mine.’ To imagine ourselves of so much consequence in the eyes of the Creator is natural to us, self-occupied as we are, till philosophy rebukes such conceit.” ”

“ The Spanish nation has been so often cheated out of the results of its insurrections, and has so repeatedly beheld a half-effected revolution converted into a reaction, that it was determined this time to guard against such delusions and disappointments. Such, at least, was the case in Madrid. Under a broiling sun, they toiled as if life and death depended on their exertions. Most of the barricades, at first constructed of very heterogeneous materials, and without much regard to symmetry, were taken down, and rebuilt of paving-stones and earth. The operation was a great nuisance. ”

“ In this paper we treat not of the barbarities of art. Barbarous ages may be of all or of any times. Art having once reached perfection, and having mastered, over the falsities of bad taste, its own independence and emancipation from every other art, we deprecate the return of a barbarism which shall unite it with a gaudy presumption of another and a lower art, subjugating the genius of mind to the meaningless handling of the decorator.
Indeed, we should be content very much to narrow the question—to care little whether the ancient statues and relievi were painted or not. ”

“ One thing these modern times, with all their fairy works of science and mighty rush of “progress,” ought to do for both Mahommedan and Jew—to convince them that there is but one faith, which never becomes obsolete—one religion, which, all independent of climate or temperature, is from God, and embraces all mankind—which is abashed by no discovery, and thrown into the shade by no improvement. The creed of Mahomet is antiquated, and in its dotage. To live a Jew in these days is to live among the tombs. Paganism is dead and gone long centuries ago. ”

“ It is not to be denied that there may be a regret and disturbance naturally felt at having to give up our belief that the planets and the stars probably contain servants and worshippers of God. It must always be a matter of pain and trouble, to be urged with tenderness, and to be performed in time, to untwine our reverential religious sentiments from erroneous views of the constitution of the Universe with which they have been involved. But the change once made, it is found that religion is uninjured, and reverence undiminished. ”

“ Strong security has God taken for the universal remembrance of that beloved country, blessed by His own Divine preference: while there is a Bible, there must be a Judea; the landscape in all its glorious tints is associated for ever with the wonderful artist’s name; and neither its wretched population nor its heathen rulers, nor all its melancholy meanness and desolation, existing now, can make Christendom forget that this discrowned city is the city over which fell the tears of the Lord. ”

“ They are not obliged to choose between washing their own dishes, or having their cutglass, silver, and china, left at the mercy of a foreigner, who has never done anything but field-work. And last, not least, they are not possessed of that ambition to do the impossible in all branches, which, I believe, is the death of a third of the women in America. What is there ever read of in books or described in foreign travel, as attained by people in possession of every means and appliance, which our women will not undertake, single-handed, in spite of every providential indication to the contrary? ”

“ Suzanne Deroux had felt hastily for something beneath the bosom of her dress, and at length drew it forth; a thin gold cross with black beads, which she kissed with fervour, then began eagerly to whisper and mutter some scraps of prayer, that might have been Latin or patois, or both; at each bead that fell from her fingers her face seemed growing calmer.
“She is quite well in other respects, Monsieur,” continued the daughter, turning impatiently from her; “she still eats like a peasant, she sleeps soundly, she prefers bright colours for her dress to go to mass and confession. ”

“ We have no Crusaders in these days; all that remains of our ancient chivalry finds holier work at home than that impossible redemption of the Holy Land, which God reserves for His own time, and His own hands; nor do we need to depend on the vagabond saint of antique times, the hero of scallop-shell and pilgrim-staff, for our knowledge of Palestine. Neither travellers nor reports are wanting, and we are by no means afflicted with monotony of tone or sameness of aspect in the revelations of our modern pilgrimages. ”

“ If you ever read that the Greeks and Romans, and other people since their times civilised, sent great distances for marble for their palaces and statues, you must put it down in your note-book of new “historic doubts.” You learn a fact you never dreamed of, from Mr Owen Jones. They merely used it (marble) because it lay accidentally at their feet. He puts the richest colouring of his contempt on “the artificial value which white marble has in our eyes.” ”

“ By this impious drivel is meant, that if this infinitude of systems be made by one God, who has peopled every orb as our own is peopled, with rational and moral beings, it is absurd to suppose that He has such a special regard for us, as the Scriptures assure us He has—that He was made flesh, and dwelt among us—lived with us, died for us, rose again for us; us, the insignificant occupants of this insignificant speck amidst the resplendent magnificence of the infinite universe. ”