Various

“ René will be in Paris on the 15th, darling Kate. He will tell you about Karl, Lizzy, Isa, all our friends, and then I shall have him again! Adrien is reading Lamartine to us; I always listen with enchantment. What poetry! It flows in streams; it is sweet, tender, melancholy, moaning; it sings with nature, with the bird, with the falling leaf, the murmuring stream, the sounding bell, the sighing wind; it weeps with the suffering heart, and prays with the pleading soul. Oh! how is it that this poet could stray aside from his heavenly road, and burn incense on other altars? ”

“ Was ever history so sad as Ireland’s? Great calamities have befallen other nations—they have been wasted by war and famine, trodden in the dust by invading barbarians; but their evils have had an end. In Ireland the sword has never wearied of blood. “The wild deer and wolf to a covert may flee,” but her people have had no refuge from famine and danger. Without home and country, they have stood for centuries with the storm of fate beating upon their devoted heads, and in their long night of woe some faint glimmer of hope has shone out, only suddenly to disappear, leaving the darkness blacker. ”

“ Yes, everything passes away, but to return; everything fades, but that it may bloom again; everything dies, to return to life transfigured.” Kate, in the beauty of this book there is to me incomparable splendor. Would you like a few more fragments from it—precious pearls which I would enshrine in my heart and memory, there to ruminate upon and enjoy them? I will send you the definition of Rome: “That delectable land full of holy images and tranquil domes, whither one goes in order to forget the world and rest the soul in the memories and associations which are there alone to be found.” ”

“ Do you understand well that love which has neither flesh nor bone; which loves only the heart and mind; which mounts without fear into the presence of God himself; which draws from him, from his grandeur, his perfections, from his infinite majesty, all its strength and all its endurance; which, fearing not death, extends beyond the grave, and lives and increases through all eternity? That celestial love—have you ever felt it? that soul within a soul, which considers virtue alone, lives only for her, and which is every moment exalted by its sacrifices and its devotion? ”

“ Longfellow, breathing the same air as Whittier, the disciple of a faith commonly supposed to be less mild and sweetly loving than a Quaker’s, has found the tenderest thoughts, the noblest images, and the highest forms of character in the church which our poet cannot even think of without raving.
But possibly we should be wrong to complain that the mystic beauty which has in all ages appealed with irresistible power of fascination to the highest and most richly-gifted natures should fail to impress one all of whose thoughts are cast in a straitened and unyielding mould. ”

“ To transform the real, to invest that which is low or mean or trivial with honor and beauty, is the triumph of the poet’s art, the test of his inspiration. His words, like the light of heaven, clothe the world in a splendor not its own, or, like the morning rays falling on the statue of Memnon, strike from dead and sluggish matter sounds of celestial harmony. ”

“ The whole church is a temple of art, with its sculptured altar, its bronze tabernacle, its rare paintings, its beautiful pillars of differently-colored marbles, and its rich windows of stained glass. Nothing could be more serene and calm than the atmosphere of this glorious church. Amid the sacred silence, the struggling light, with the grandest symbols of religion on every side, you feel lifted for a moment out of your own mean imprisonments into a very heaven of art and piety. ”

“ An unknown power draws us back into the dread bosom of the past. The freshness of life dies out of us; we grow to the spot, and feel a kinship with stones which re-echoed the footsteps of saints, which resounded with the voice of prayer. It seems almost a sacrilege to live when the great and the good lie dead at our feet.
But why stop we here? Is not Ireland covered with ruins as reverend and as sad as these? ”

“ In Ireland a Catholic, no matter whence he come, forgets that he is in a foreign land; and in proportion to the love with which he cherishes his faith is the sympathy that draws him to the people who have clung to it through more suffering and sorrow than have fallen to the lot of any other. More than other races they have loved the church; more than others they have believed that, so long as faith and hope and love are left to the heart, misery can never be supreme. The force with which they realize the unseen world leaves them unbroken amid the reverses and calamities of this life. ”

“ In the flower of his age, he already possessed a vast deal of erudition; his soul above all—his soul so beautiful, superior to his genius—inspired me with a devotion for him as deep as it was inviolable. Candor, simplicity, gentleness, and a natural inclination to be accommodating, a modesty seldom found, integrity above temptation—all virtues in fact, that combine to form the worthy citizen—were found united in him, and it would have been impossible for me to have found in all the world a being more worthy of inspiring friendship, or more capable of feeling and appreciating all its charms. ”

“ The hills that once were covered with rich forests of oak are bare and bleak; the cathedral is in ruins; the churches are crumbling walls and heaps of stones; the ground is strewn with fragments of sculptured crosses and broken pillars; and amid this wreck of a world are mingled in strange confusion the tombs of saints and princes and the graves of peasants. Still stands the round tower in lonely majesty, like a sentinel of heaven, to watch for ever over the graves of God’s people. What a weight of awe falls upon us amid these sacred monuments! We speak not, and scarcely breathe. ”

“ The voice of battle is hushed; the song of victory is silent; the strong are fallen; the valiant are dead, and around forgotten graves old ocean chants the funeral dirge. Monuments of death mark all human triumphs. And yet St. Columba and his grand old monks are not wholly dead. To them more than to the poet belongs the non omnis moriar. Their spirit lives even in us, if we are Christians and trust the larger hope. What heavenly privilege, like them, to be free, and in the desert and ocean’s waste to find the possibility of the diviner life; like them, to be strong, leaning upon God only! ”

“ ENGLISH RULE IN IRELAND. No one can pass from England into Ireland without being struck by the contrast in the condition of the two countries—a contrast so marked and absolute that it is revealed at the first glance, and in lines so bold and rigid that it seems to have been produced by nature itself. In England there is wealth, thrift, prosperity; in Ireland, poverty, helplessness, decay. Into the great heart of London, through arteries that stretch round the globe, the riches of the whole earth are poured. ”

“ The power to take up into one’s own mind the thoughts of a whole people; to give a voice to the impressions made upon them by nature, religion, and society; to interpret to them their doubts, longings, and aspirations; to awaken the chords of deep and hidden sympathy which but await the touch of inspiration—is genius. Every great author is the type of a generation, the interpreter of an age, the delineator of a phase of national life. Between the character of a people, therefore, and its literature there is an intimate relation ”

“ Dublin is a city of the past, and, in spite of its imposing structures, impresses us sadly. The English cities are busy marts of commerce or homes of comfort, luxury, and learning. The Irish towns are empty, silent, decayed. Into England’s ports come the ships of all the nations; but in Ireland’s hardly a sail is unfurled. There the chimneys of innumerable factories shut out with their black smoke the light of heaven; here the Round Tower or the crumbling ruin stands as a monument of death. England is over-crowded; in Ireland we travel for miles without meeting a human being ”

“ What an epoch was that thirteenth century, that age of faith, when the throne had its saints, when there was in the souls of men a spring of energy and of religious enthusiasm which peopled the monasteries and renewed the face of the earth! Who will obtain for me the grace to love God as did Elizabeth? O dear saint! pray for me, for René, Karl, Ellen, the church, France, Ireland, the universe.
Here is something, dear sister, which I think would comfort Karl:
“To desire God is the essential condition of the human heart; to go to God is his life; to contemplate God is his beatitude. ”

“ Plato had said: ‘To be a philosopher is to learn to die’; and again: ‘What is needful in order to see God?—to be pure and to die.’ Augustine studied this great art; he put it in practice at Cassiacum, and the light, like a river whose embankments have been broken down, flooded his vast intellect. What Plato hoped for and conjectured he saw. That which passed in the rich imagination of the philosopher as a confused though sublime presentiment existed with clearness and precision in the luminous intelligence of the saint, and sprang forth from his heart in accents such as Plato never imagined. ”

“ When men fail us, as sooner or later they surely will, what matter? God remains to us. There is truly within us a source of mysterious sadness which makes us realize, perhaps better than any other reason, our condition as exiles. When life is sad and oppressive, repose uncertain—when happiness appears impossible—we weep, were it even over the happiness of others, and love to prostrate ourselves before the cross with this admirable prayer of Mme. Swetchine on our lips: “My God, I throw myself, body and soul, blindly at thy feet!”
Dear Kate, may God and the holy angels guide us to you! ”

“ As he said this, Kingston, the lieutenant of the Tower, entered, followed by an escort of armed guards.
The sound of their footsteps, the clanking of their arms, astonished Margaret. Her bosom heaved. She felt that there was no longer any resistance to be offered; she understood that it was this power which threatened to crush and destroy all she loved—she, poor young girl, facing these armed men, covered with iron, clashing with steel; these living machines, who understood neither eloquence, reason, truth, sex, age, nor beauty. ”

“ Pierre Gilles! Pierre Gilles! it is you who love my father. Ah! listen to me. He is up there; this is the second time they have made him appear before them. Alas! doubtless to-day will be the last; for they are tired—tired of falsehoods, artifices, and base, vile manœuvres; they are tired of offering him gold and silver—he who wants only heaven and God; they are weary of urging, of tormenting this saintly bishop and this upright man, in order to extort from them an oath which no Christian can or ought to take. ”

“ In fact, he has taken the trouble to tell us that he has considered the story of Mogg Megone only as a framework for sketches of the scenery of New England and of its early inhabitants. His own confession proves his art mechanical. He gets a frame, stretches the canvas, and deliberately proceeds to copy. The true poet fuses man and nature into a union so intimate that both seem part of each. He dreams not of framework and sketches, but of the unity and harmony of life. Where the common eye sees but parts, his sees the living whole. He does not copy, but transforms and re-creates. ”

“ At each side of the high altar are low, sepulchral recesses, into which you look down through a grating at the coroneted tombs, before which lamps hang dimly burning. Over the altar the Good Shepherd is going in search of his lost lambs, and at the left is a great, pale Christ on the Cross, ghastly and terrible in the shadowy, torch-lit arch. The whole church is paved with tomb-stones, like most of the churches of Avila, as if the idea of death could never be separated from life. But then, which is death and which life? Is it not in the womb of the grave we awaken to the real life? ”