Various

“ In Byron's poetry love and hate are no mere affectations; they are genuinely depicted, and meant; while sorrow is touched with the tender cadence of a real grief. There beats in all his verse a true throbbing heart, with all the inconsistencies of temperament which belong to human nature. There is the secret of his power, the magic of his verse, which must live so long as hearts shall beat to the tune of love, and there are sorrows in this world of unrest.
The universality of this heart-music is easily understood, even though the intellect of man be ever changing ”

“ The various thoughts and feelings of humanity are capable of being expressed in art, in every branch of it. Joy and sorrow, triumph and despair, can be expressed alike faithfully by music,{6} painting, or poetry. The pain that is never entirely absent from this painful earth, aches in sculpture, in verse, and in melody; the love that beats in the great heart of the universe, breathes from the canvas, the marble, and the minstrel. Two arts especially are so blended as to be almost synonymous—Music and Poetry. Poetry is inarticulate music, harmony is song without words. ”

“ Pain develops faculties which would otherwise lie dormant, and thus out of much suffering grew the deathless song of Byron and the immortal music of Beethoven. Nursed by neglect, fostered by contempt, grew their soul-children into a life which triumphed over the scorn which had slighted their infancy—beautiful soul-children, that shall live for ever in the eternal youth of genius. So long as the heart of humanity shall continue to throb, so long shall continue Byron's verse and Beethoven's harmonies. ”

“ Heroic deeds were celebrated in song, love-stories were immortalised in song, ere there was a note of written music or a word of written verse. Thus the twin-sister arts music and poetry, in their infancy scarce distinguishable, passed on hand in hand; but with the lapse of years they grew more divided, their different features becoming more developed, until now, their triumphs have apparently raised a barrier between them, and people forget that they are twin; but the chord of sympathy is still there. The union is not less; it is only less visible, because more intricate. ”

“ Rich, melodious, dreamy are they both; and each leaves on the listener the same impression as of wandering through a land of perfect loveliness, peopled by beautiful spirits, chanting music now full of exquisite fancies, and{7} again uttering wild cries for that rest and peace which the intellect alone cannot give. A fairy world is that dream-land of Shelley and of Mendelssohn.
Ever nearer to human nature is the music of the heart, the one thing in the universe that changes not. ”

“ Therefore the works of Shelley are admirable examples of the poetry of the intellect.
Mendelssohn is his counterpart in music; there is the same vivid imagination, the same perfection of harmony, the same wealth of melody in the works of both. His music displays a rich intellect and a brilliant fancy; in it there is mechanical perfection; there is all that knowledge and education can do; heart only is awanting. ”

“ Strains of infinite tenderness and burning notes of passionate intensity, go to the heart of the listener with that strange undefinable power—that thrill, which is the charm of Beethoven's music. That composer once remarked that ‘music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.’ His music has accomplished both. The works of other musicians may delight or astonish; Weber's sweet notes have a home in many hearts, and Mozart's versatile genius has given to dramatic music its highest expression ”

“ How is it that ‘sweetness is wrung out of pain, as the juice is crushed away from the cane?’ Out of the fire comes the purified gold, and out of the furnace of trial and pain and sorrow, comes that perfect sympathy which lies at the root of genius. ”

“ The three great moving powers of humanity are Faith, Reason, Passion—the Soul, the Head, the Heart. Faith, reverence, worship, or by whatever name may be called that feeling in man which causes him to adore a being greater than himself, has been expressed in poetry by Milton; in music by Handel. Reason, the thoughts of the human mind, the gropings after a true philosophy, has been expressed in the poetry of Shelley, in the music of Mendelssohn. Passion—each varied emotion that throbs in the heart of man, is expressed in the poetry of Byron, in the music of Beethoven. ”

“ Thus painting may exhibit the beauty of form as in sculpture, and architecture may combine the beauties both of painting and sculpture, while poetry can in some measure unite the properties of each art. ”

“ Stories innumerable are told of the delicate feats of aiming performed by enthusiasts of the game; and it is wonderful what skill is often shewn in the shots taken by good curlers with their unwieldy looking weapons; the narrow ‘ports’ or openings between two stones that they can make their missiles pass through, and the dexterity they shew in calculating the bias of the ice and the exact amount of angle necessary to make their cannons. This too, with stones thirty or forty pounds in weight!
Each player provides himself with a broom to sweep up the ice before a too lazy stone ”

“ Art in its different developments may be said to express one idea—beauty. As in different parts of the world different languages are spoken, which all express the same thoughts and feelings, though in different ways, so all the arts are but the various ways of expressing the one moving spirit, the one idea, which is beauty. Painting exhibits or expresses beauty of colour; Sculpture, beauty of form; Architecture, beauty of proportion; Music, beauty of harmony; Poetry, beauty of thought. ”

“ The Irish poor are, as a rule, indifferent to creature comforts. They love their liberty under hedge and open sky; and resemble the dog in the fable, who preferred his precarious bone and freedom to the good feeding and luxuries of his tied-up friend. A wretched old woman, decrepit and barefoot, appearing on the hall-door steps of a house she was in the habit of visiting, would be remonstrated with in vain by her patrons, however delicately the obnoxious subject, the poorhouse, was approached. ”

“ At Edinburgh, perhaps as much as at any other place, has the game prospered within the last century, though in one point the game has lost a recognition it once had, if we believe the old tradition that, about a hundred and fifty years ago, the Town-Council used to go to the ice in all the pomp and circumstance that it now reserves for the Commissioner's procession, with a band playing ‘appropriate airs’ before it, which discoursed sweet music while the fathers of the city gave an hour or two to the game. ”

“ It is astonishing what a fillip to the day's sport a single woodcock added to the bag will give. Row after row of cock-pheasants, noble in proportions, and in their really beautifully variegated plumage, may be laid out with other game on the lawn at the evening count-up, and the host may proudly scan these evidences of the prowess of himself and his guests and the excellence of his preserves ”

“ There is first the poetry and music in which the feeling of worship, the element of religion, is prime agent. Milton can be fairly taken as the poet of reverence. Owing to the peculiar circumstances of his life and times, the great power of his verse is a cry against the follies and sins of a debased people, an earnest cry for more strength of purpose, more firmness of will. It all strives to exalt a Deity who was like to be forgotten by a nation steeped in the vices and frivolities of Cavalier times. ”

“ Old Father Time rings many changes; hour by hour and day by day they steal upon us, imperceptibly but surely; and we mark their advent but slightly, until at our yearly gatherings, when friend meets friend and long-severed ties are reunited, the missing links shew many a vacant chair, and faces filled with joy in meeting their beloved once more, ever and anon cloud over, as memory recalls departed joys which never can return. ”

“ That slender form and faultless face, the dazzling purity of the complexion, and the lustre of the violet eyes, that contrasted so well with the wealth of dark hair simply braided back from the temples and twisted into a massive coil—these conferred beauty, if ever woman, since Eve's time, deserved to be called beautiful. ”

“ Harmony and friendly feeling prevail; and if, on the ice as elsewhere, all men are not equal, it is because a quick eye, a sound head, and a steady hand make now the shepherd, now the laird, ‘king o' a' the core.’
Though so eminently a Scottish game, evidence goes to prove that the pastime was brought to us from the continent not very long ago—three hundred years or so. ”

“ Nathan Boltz was truly one of Nature's gentlemen; a self-educated man, a great reader, a deep thinker, a humble imitator of the Divine Master. This was the man who, unaware of his true greatness, lived a life of real enjoyment in zealously performing his duties and working for his daily bread. ”

“ When he indulges in his twisting and darting tricks, he is a wonderfully easy bird to miss. Sometimes he will fly off slowly for a short distance, turn sharply to the right or left behind a tree, bush, hedge, or other object, dart swiftly onwards for fifty yards or so, and suddenly drop, or perhaps, as if receiving a new impetus from his sudden change of direction, speed away to some far-distant shelter. In covert, however, a woodcock's ulterior point, whatever peculiarities of flight he may indulge in on being flushed, is generally the first opening between the tree-tops ”

“ When a black frost seals up the ground, and ice covers our ponds and lochs, among the amusements then open to those north of the Tweed there is none more healthful and exhilarating than the game of curling, the mode of playing at which we shall presently explain for the benefit of our non-initiated readers. ”

“ Unaffected in the main by religion or education, we see the same feelings, with all their varying moods, in the inhabitants of the sunniest climes or of the lands of winter snows. Thus is the heart of man ever the same. True genius speaks to that heart ”

“ The course of a game is generally something like this, though in no sport are there greater variations, or more circumstances calling forth all that judgment, skill, and experience only can teach. The ‘lead’ or first player's object is simple: he tries to ‘draw’ his shot—that is, to play his stone up the ice towards the end where stands his skip directing, so that the stone may lie if possible within the rings; and if he is a skilful player, his stone rests say a few feet short of the tee. ”

“ The marvel is that the strong temptation is so universally resisted, and that no effect has followed the example set by that Bishop of Orkney two centuries ago, whose ‘process,’ says Baillie in his Letters, ‘came before us; he was a curler on the Sabbath-day.’
No game promotes sociality more than curling; none unites on one common platform the different classes of society better than it does.
The tenant and his jolly laird,
The pastor and his flock,
join in the game without patronage on one side or any loss of respect on the other. ”

“ Passing on amid the ragged hedges, the lean cattle, squalid children, and tumble-down hovels of this unattractive population, but acknowledging twice or thrice a half-sullen nod or growl of recognition on the part of some male member of the community who stood whistling or chewing a straw at gate or gap, the wayfarer at last reached a spot where, at the junction of four narrow lanes, stood a dilapidated house of entertainment, its thatched roof stained and broken, and with not a few of the panes in its unwashed windows rudely replaced by boards or sackcloth. ”