Various

“ A flower garden is in front, and a sweep of rich sward rolls from the back parlor windows down to the water’s edge. It is a quiet rural dwelling, and the home of my childhood. Does it not look sequestered and deliciously cool? That waterfall, which sounds a perpetual anthem night and day, can be seen from the windows. The fine grove forever spreads its sea of green in front, and here are the old bridge, the village cut into fragments, and the rough hills giving a dash of the sublime to what is in itself so beautiful! ”

“ Keeping always aloof from the throng of admirers who now found their way habitually to a house where such varied attractions were ever to be met, Ernest seemed abstracted and indifferent. The incense offered by the professed danglers, the attentions of beaux, the heavy bon-mots of would-be witlings, fell on his ear unheeded; but when one of lofty mind and noble character, a man worthy of respect and affection, when such an one offered his homage at the shrine of youthful beauty, Ernest was all eye, all ear, aye, and all heart.
Was Ernest in love with Mary Allison? Who can tell? ”

“ Thank you for drinking my health, gentlemen—you ask me whether we have any such thing as a clam-bake in Philadelphia—bless my soul! if we had, it wouldn’t be such a place for riots, broken banks, and all sorts of other eccentricities. Starvation was the cause of the French Revolution—to the fogs of England can be traced the suicides there—and it’s my candid belief that the absence of clam-bakes whereat to recreate is the prime origin of the present difficulties. Don’t ask me to demonstrate my position, for I hate logic as I hate olives and old maids. ”

“ If any one has ever heard the quick, sharp, piercing shriek of a woman in the last extremity of peril, he can easily conceive the terrible energy of Miss Chamberlain’s screams to escape from her pursuer, and awaken the Duke of Rutland and his gallant son. The deep shrillness of her anguished cries pierced every ear throughout the towers of Haddon. At that still moment, in the dead hour of midnight, there was not one living creature within the walls, but started up appalled. The dogs set up a most dismal howl, and the castle bell quickly rung out its deafening tones on the night air. ”

“ Shakspeare everywhere discriminates between his characters and his true women, those that are to be a part of the drama of life as the actors, the women swayed by discordant passions, and those that appeal to our love. Never does he confound them. Those that are designed for our love are not characters. Whatever maybe their dignity, their intellect, their fortunes, they are still women. The grace of womanhood invests all they say, and all they do. Such are Portia, Cordelia, Desdemona, Ophelia, Rosalind, &c. ”

“ In some places so intense was the conflagration that the fire was at a white heat. The whole horizon was illuminated with the light, except just over and ahead of the schooner, where a black smoky cloud had gathered, looking like the wing of some gigantic monster of another world; and no description can adequately picture the spectral aspect of the gloomy waves that rolled up their ghastly crests beneath this canopy.
“She cannot last much longer,” said the doctor, who was in my boat, “the flames will soon reach the magazine.” ”

“ All day long you see bright faces and hear gay laughter; and when evening steals on, and the moon rises in the azure sky, trailing a fairy line of light across the waters, and flooding the snowy beach with her effulgence—when the night wind murmurs among the trees, or sighs over the sleeping bay—when the jocund music strikes up and you dance merrily on the hard white sand, while bright eyes sparkle and fair cheeks flush with love—then you have a foretaste of heaven, and wish to lie down and sleep, and, sleeping, dream of such delicious pastime. ”

“ In a royal circle nearly every other feeling is extinct, and the pressure for favor and the sacrifice of minor (and how much more graceful and noble) considerations at the shrine of courtly or fashionable ambition are, to the observing eye, very visible beneath the glittering surface of society. The king knows no body. He has no opportunity of seeing, hearing or judging. The good and the bad address him alike in the language of homage and adulation, and he comes at last to lose his natural sympathies with the human race—to regard them as inferiors—machines, cattle. ”

“ Such may do for the statue-like creations of Maria Edgeworth, and the thousand and one other romance writers, who expect woman to move by rule—who mistake dullness for goodness, and apathy for grace; but they awaken in ourselves no emotions of sympathy, for the human heart can respond only to human emotions, and it at once goes forth to greet its kindred impulses. Fielding’s Sophia is more lovable than Scott’s Rowena, simply because one is a live, earnest woman, and the other designed to be a very perfect one, and she turns out to be a very dull one. ”

“ I never see a young man going on a pic-nic, but I ask if insanity doesn’t run in his family. But a clam-bake, sirs, is a different affair. On the hard, smooth, white sand of the bay shore you pitch your tent, for music having the low voice of the ripples as they break on the beach, the fresh breeze the while crisping the waves into silver, and fanning you with a delicious coolness that reminds you of the airs of that Eden you used to dream of when a child. ”

“ At nightfall I have wandered amid those graves—a little child, and yet fearless—till the stars have stationed themselves in the blue heavens above me, and the fireflies have flashed their tiny brilliants among the grass, like gentle spirits sent to light up the places of the dead; and thoughts, for which I had no name, would fill my heart with pleasant sadness till I went away, reluctantly, amid feelings that haunted me at night as I listened to the acorns rattling from the oak trees over the roof of our house, and colored my dreams long after the dash of the waterfall had lulled me to sleep. ”

“ When infancy gave place to childhood, with its increasing cares, it was Ernest Melvyn who became the confidant of all little Mary’s anxieties and pleasures. It was he who wrought out the tedious sum, and explained the wonderfully abstruse rules of that hated grammar, and aided her in remembering those troublesome chronological tables, and, in short, removed every stumbling-block, while he lightened every burden of her school life.
In the mean time Mr. Allison’s elder daughters were growing up to womanhood, as beautiful as they were gentle and good. ”

“ Like Desdemona, she will blush at the mention of herself, feeling she is so nicely balanced—and then, with a woman’s best and sweetest attribute, she spreadeth forth her hand for support.
Let the crowning grace of womanhood be, that she is characterless. The beautiful and beloved of all ages may be thus defined. With all the queenly attributes of Isabella, of Spain, we feel she was all of woman. So was the lonely and unfortunate Mary Stuart, and she still holdeth a place in our hearts. ”

“ THE DOOM OF THE DART. The day had been close and sultry, but, as sunset drew on, a light breeze sprung up, which diffused a delicious coolness throughout the ship, imparting new vigor to the panting and almost exhausted men. Invigorated by the welcome wind, a group of us gathered on the weather quarter to behold the sun go down; and those who have never seen such a spectacle at sea can have no idea of the vastness with which it fills the mind. ”

“ A magnificent grove of white pines stoops and murmurs to the wind as it draws down the valley, the tufted boughs give out a healthy odor, and in their shadows are a thousand grassy nooks and hollows filled with wild blossoms that give a richer fragrance to the air. I have said there was but one house in the river vale. A little back from the river’s brink, and just beyond the clump of chesnuts at the end of the bridge, are two large oak trees, sheltering, and almost hiding a low cottage house. ”

“ During the short space we had been conversing, the dark clouds astern had increased their velocity threefold, and, even as the skipper spoke, the most advanced of them had over-shadowed us with its sepulchral pall. As the momentary puff of air accompanying it died away, a few large heavy rain-drops pattered on the deck, and then all was still again. The men sprung to their stations, at the voice of their superior, and incited to double activity by these signs of approaching danger, soon reduced our canvass until the schooner lay, with bare poles, rocking on the swell. ”

“ Rarely does such an attachment terminate without suffering—rarely does that passionless dream fade into the splendors of a brighter reality—rarely does the heart awake from its trance of sublimated feeling to find loftier and sweeter impulses in actual life and perfect love.
From such perils, to which her romantic temper would probably have exposed her, Mary Allison was preserved by the watchfulness of Ernest. Indeed their mutual regard seemed to possess much of the character of such an affection as has just been described, but without its dangers. ”

“ Congress passed a resolution of condolence with the friends of the officers who died in the Intrepid, as well as with those of all the officers who fell before Tripoli. Of these brave men, Somers, on account of his rank, the manner of his death, and his previous exploits, has stood foremost with the country and the service. These claims justly entitle him to this high distinction. Among all the gallant young men that this war first made known to the nation, he has always maintained a high place, and, as it is a station sealed with his blood, it has become sacred to the entire republic. ”