Various

“ The young girl may coquette, or flirt with the man who adores her; she may wring his heart with bitter agony; she may show her power, and he may acknowledge it, but he will lose some respect for her—though he bows to her influence. He is honest and sincere. She, perhaps, admits it, but trifles with him. How many young ladies have lost the esteem of those who would have loved and cherished them for life by mere thoughtlessness or caprice. The young widow understands men better. She is rarely a flirt. She can distinguish between the honest lover and the mere admirer. ”

“ The atmosphere of her home is rainy with tears, and when abroad she is cloudy. Yet as time wears on, it is evident that the forty days and forty nights of affliction’s great deluge must go by, and at length the sorrowful widow will look for the appearance of the sun of cheerfulness, and trust that with it will come a rain beau. The gradual assumption of cheerfulness begins to make itself visible in her costume. Half mourning assumes the place of sombre weeds. On her face smiles occasionally chase away the lingering vestiges of regret. ”

“ Here the question was not about any “dangerous classes,” whom society must take in hand in order to secure its own safety. Here the question was about a class, the least dangerous of all, the most defenseless within the range of society—about solitary women, who, after a life of toil and self-denial in the service of the young generation, go forth into silence, no one knows where, and hide an existence which they almost feel to be supernumerary, to be a burden—go forth, often, like the sick bird, which seeks out a gloomy solitude of the wood in which to die.
The aged governess! ”

“ Far in the depths of those fairy gardens, girdled, as it were, by groves of almost impenetrable richness, watered by a hundred fountains, drawn through their secret canals, from the one mighty river, which was to Egypt what the soul is to the human frame, adorned by luxury that could be made to minister happiness to the living, stood the mansion of the dead, the mausoleum of the Ptolemies, the palace-tomb of Cleopatra. ”

“ Her heart is buried with her husband, but she considers it only as a seed which in good time will spring up again and blossom. If she weeps, she does it with a gentle sorrow, like a slight sprinkle on a sunshiny day. Her sky has its clouds, but the cerulean of anticipation lies beyond, and gives a pleasant aspect to the mists of sadness. The gay widow laughs as if she had never been married ”

“ But as his eye falls on the deep, black dust, covering the rocky floor on which he treads, into which have mouldered the doors, the door-posts, and all the inner fittings of the temple, he feels that ages have rolled away since the artisans were numbered among the dead.
The art of design, whether apparent in painting or sculpture, was used in Egypt, as must already have appeared, not to excite the imagination, but to inform the understanding. According to Clement of Alexandria, an Egyptian temple was “a writing,” addressing itself, like a volume, to the mind. ”

“ Oh! it’s wonderful when politics get into a woman’s head how they drive nature out of it!—they beat small tea-parties, and fairs, and dances, and patterns—ay, and falling in love—out and out for making a woman forget herself. And yet if there’s a thing in the world she is proud of, it is that babby, and sitting at the head of her tea-table, pouring out tea, and laying down the law. You used to say, aunty dear, that a woman never went out and out to the bad, until her heart got into the wrong place: indeed, you and the landlady would not agree at all ”

“ In the curve, too, of his well-defined and ruddy lips there was that firmness, that bold decision, which almost belied the dimples at their corners, and the voluptuous curve of the chin. He seemed a man who possessed the energy to battle with the universe, to win a world, and when won, the recklessness to cast it away as worthless. Nor did his countenance misrepresent the character of the Triumvir.
It was Marc Antony, the glorious winner of the Roman world, and its reckless loser. It was Marc Antony, returning in defeat—with any other it had been despair ”

“ After the first burst of agony was over, when the self-immolated victim was borne to her in place of the burning, feeling, living lover, she had caused those hated reptiles to be brought to the tomb, which she had entered while yet alive, in the very recklessness of dissimulation and caprice; she had applied them to her delicate bosom, and a thrill of triumphant ecstasy had rushed through her frame as she felt the keen pang of their venomed fangs piercing her flesh, and imbuing the very sources of life with the ingredients of death. ”

“ There is something beyond this in woman, through her own work, being able to acquire a self-relying position in society, a noble independence for the life both of soul and body; that she may feel, may know from childhood upward that she may courageously look toward a future which she, through her own power of work, can prepare for herself; to know that creditable work is not disgrace. And that beautiful consciousness which already exists in the intellectual heights of society, may alike in the palace and the cottage of the peasant be acquired by all. ”

“ We must have men—not men of genius. No, surely no! These are they who turn the world upside down, and the folly of individuals runs so high at present that one can’t repress them without manœuvre.—No! the monk’s wisdom, in Rabelais, is the true wisdom for our peace, and the peace of others. To do duty, as far as may be, to speak well of the prior, and to let the world wag as it will. And things go right well, for the mass is content with this. If I knew history, I would prove to you, that all the ills on earth come of your men of genius ”

“ Little by little the sad widow becomes resigned to her great loss, and gradually she learns to think that it may be repaired by a new matrimonial gain. Yet she is slow in assuming the garniture of happiness. She may occasionally be coaxed out into the world, and even tempted to attend a party or ball; but she does not forget that she is a widow. She is in the world, but yet not of it. ”

“ Why should they not? Every thing which makes old age bright—yes, perhaps, which makes it the most cheerful portion of a woman’s life—quietness, a secure future, all the amenities of daily life, society, retirement, the kindest care, the most faithful guardianship, every thing which at their age might reasonably be desired, all this is theirs. With a joyful heart I left this institution, over which the most splendid autumnal sun seemed to cast its blessing, and drove with Mrs. Laing to the home of the younger governesses, which also, I was desirous of visiting. ”

“ If the century opened with lustre derived from the physical demonstrations of Newton, it closed magnificently with the telescopic discoveries of Herschel, the wonderful resident by the stately battlements of Windsor, by whose mechanical skill and matchless industry new regions were added to our solar system, and views unfolded of the infinity of the firmament, and the character of its architecture, which eye had not seen or the mind conceived. ”

“ Happy is the shepherd, then, who sees in the expanse before him the clear waters of a pool or lake, at which his flocks and herds may eagerly slake their thirst. But these may fail to be enjoyed; what appeared to be water may prove to be only the mirage—emblem of forbidden pleasures, exciting hope to entail only bitter disappointment. There remains, then, but one alternative—to dig a well; a process indispensable in the earliest days of human history. ”

“ THE SHARK AND HIS HABITS.
Far as the breeze can bear, or billows foam,
All seas their kingdom, and each clime their home.
As free as a bird says the proverb—as free as a fish say we; for if fish be not their own masters, who are? No other creature has half the facilities for shifting quarters and changing domicile that he has. ”

“ To sooty dark;”
and waving wide savannas, luxuriant as oriental gardens, over which the shadows chase each other statelily, or linger lovingly, like shady islets in a “sea of green.” And then the tempered sunlight, all shorn of summer’s fierceness, by the hazy, dream-like air; and, over all, the arching sky, not laughing, as in April, and not glowing, like July, but full of deep repose, the holy calm of spirit-land. Who that loves beauty would not live in a variable clime? ”

“ Laing, who told me how that, ever since her earliest youth, she had wished above every thing to be able some time to be of use to the distressed of her own sex, whose smoother path of life she herself was beginning to tread; and of the happiness which she now experienced, in finding herself in a position to accomplish the warm wishes of her youthful years. Beautiful and cheering is the sun! But still more beautiful and cheering is the sun of human kindness in a human eye! ”

“ The fire had rapidly fallen to mere cinders, and its light faded to a faint glow, upon the adjacent thicket. The rangers flitted silently from tree to tree, like moving shadows. Each carried his gun poised low, in readiness for immediate action; and each placed his hand upon his knife, for the conflict—man to man. They gradually closed in, until the flanks met upon the farther side, and a cordon was drawn around the thicket, less than twenty paces across. The fate of the slumbering savages seemed sealed; for these were men who never spared an enemy, and never shrank from battle. ”

“ Now, to take pride out of mere money there and then, seems of all things the most unnatural for those who have souls in their bodies: the understanding that two and two make four, doesn’t seem much to be proud of, and yet that’s the beginning and end of half the knowledge and pride going—of all the knowledge the gold-seekers care about, just as if grubbing up and counting up would make them all as one as the rale quality ”

“ What mean’st thou, paltering with thy double speeches?”
“Mortua est—she is dead!” he cried, mustering all his resolution, and then, as if fearing the wrath of the triumvir, fled hastily into the palace.
“Dead! Cleopatra dead!” muttered the bold Epicurean, and the whiteness of his lips told how deeply he was affected by the unexpected news. “Ho, there!” he shouted. “Bear me a flagon of Falernian hither, and the jeweled cup of Isis—the old Falernian pressed in the first of Caius Marius! ’Twill be my last on this side Acheron! A battle—an empire—and a woman! ”

“ It was a glorious sight to look upon those almost boundless plains, or on those wondrous valleys, bounded on either hand by mountains then clothed with artificial verdure even to their summits, in the early summer, when the tender herbage of the young grain had spread them with an interminable carpet of the brightest green, or in the genial noon of autumn, when the tall wheat and bearded barley undulated in every breeze, a sea of golden fertility. ”

“ The truth appears to be, that as when we view a country beneath a brilliant sky and a balmy atmosphere, we are apt to frame our impressions of the people in harmony with the beauty of the scene; so, to the early admirers of Newton, his intellectual greatness invested with fictitious lustre his private character, and the infirmities of the man were lost sight of in the glory of the sage. ”

“ A lazy felucca lay motionless on the shore; and, in her, a lazy boatman was stretched at full length. We questioned him as to the practicability of our instant embarkation for Morocco. He turned up his head, eyed us inquisitively, as if to satisfy himself how mad we were, told us to “Go with God,” coiled himself up, and disposed his limbs in that posture of utter, uncompromising idleness, of which only the limbs of Spanish boatmen and Italian lazzaroni are capable. The master of a sailing-vessel had, however, more confidence in our sanity and in his own bark, and we struck a bargain with him. ”