Various

“ The very creation of God, which required but the will and word of Omnipotence for instant and perfect existence, has been gradually constructed—the earth on which we stand, so fair to look upon, so robed with beauty, so radiant with life and light, has been evolved from chaos through innumerable formations and even the thunder so astounding in its crash, and the lightning so sudden in its stroke, have long been generating in the womb of heaven. The man of genius, the man of creative power, is at once inspired and industrious ”

“ How full of beauty is “The Vision,” the poem in which, with a self-conscious greatness, almost Miltonic, he celebrates his own consecration to the glory of his country; we read it in delight, in wonder, and with sorrow, and with joy; we verily admit, that, “the light which led astray was light from heaven.” With what solemn pleasure we recall the “Cottar’s Saturday Night.” No other poem in the language shows how much the eye of a poet can see, how much the heart of a poet can feel, where another heart is dull, and another eye is blind. ”

“ Burns, the gladdener of so many hearts, was at last outwrestled, and the mighty fell—Burns, who had so deeply felt the rapture of genius, and the misery of life.
The retribution with which the errors of Burns chastised him, holds out impressive warning to all who are capable of drawing wisdom from example. If happiness could have found a resting-place in one of the most honest hearts that ever struck against a manly bosom; if happiness had been with noble poetry, with an eloquence that never failed, with an imagination rich as the breast of nature, and bright as the stars in heaven ”

“ With a little stretch of imagination we can easily go back some years and fancy it to be the same day and the same occasion. You are again the mistress of this beautiful home; troops of friends will again come at our bidding; nature is clad in the same green mantle; the birds sing the same songs; and the waters murmur the same tunes. A kind Providence has also turned our darkness into light. One short hour ago, and yonder mountain was robed in mist to its very base; see, now, how it sparkles in the sunshine! But, Lucy, why are you plucking all those beautiful flowers? ”

“ It is no mawkish pretence of sentiment. Burns is true to what he feels; and, right or wrong, he speaks it as it is. He maintains this course in his good and his evil. It saved him from groveling and bombast; it saved him from intellectual cant, and from literary quackery. No language is so eloquent as honest language. Truth goes direct to its purpose, while affectation is crawling around its petty circumlocutions; and, as the straight line is the shortest, the most sincere words are the most resistless. As the poet had honesty in himself, he had faith in others. ”

“ Nature in her seems to have taken Art to her bosom, and assimilated it, through love, with herself, until the identity of each is lost in the other.
The union of such musical science—such thoroughly disciplined art with such artlessness and simplicity, is, perhaps, the crowning mystery of her genius. To know and to love are the conditions of triumph in all the exalted spheres of human labor; and in the musical drama, they have never been so admirably united. Her command of expression seems not so much the result of study as of inspiration ”

“ Princes’ favorites are apt to be undeserving men, notwithstanding they may be set off with all the trim of greatness, state, and power; for princes are men, not gods, and though they can give wealth and titles, they cannot give virtues, that is out of their power. But Duke Cozimo had proved the correctness of his judgment in the choice of his friend. Sanazarro’s nature was like pure, tried gold, and any stamp of grace the duke was pleased to give him, to make him current to the world, did but add honor to the royal bestower. ”

“ I say not that his moral humanity was extinguished, because that would be uncandid; but I do say, that he became fantastic and capricious to such a degree as to fail in the charities which not only soften life, but dignify literature.
Attributing humor to Burns, I do not estimate it as the slight matter which many seem to think it. If we trust some persons, we should conceive that length of face was length of wisdom, gravity of look, the veil of oracles; thickness of skull the safeguard of knowledge; and rigidity of muscle, the solemn surface of an unfathomable philosophy. ”

“ Recitation is too tame, pantomime too silent, scenic art too illusive, costume too familiar, music too unpicturesque; but all these combined are, at once, as romantic, exciting, impressive, and melo-dramatic as the varied aptitudes, the exacting taste, and the broad, experimental genius of the age. The gifts of nature, the resources of art, the gratification of the senses, the exigencies of fashion and taste, and the wants of the heart and imagination find in the Opera a most convenient luxury. The lyrical drama has thus gradually usurped the place of tournament and theatre ”

“ But humor in its higher form is the quality, not only of a liberal, but of a cultivated spirit. It requires that the mental powers be vigorous as well as genial. It requires imagination and intellect, as well as a heart in the right place, and the juices of the body in a good condition. Humor as well as pathos is the result of sympathy—of sympathy that embraces man in the most brotherly cordiality—weeps with those who weep, and rejoices with those who do rejoice. This is the humor of Shakspeare; it is the humor of Hogarth; it is the humor of Burns. ”

“ In knowledge of man, Burns strikes us with wonder unspeakable, when we consider the narrow circle in which he lived, and the early age at which he died. A single song is like a compressed drama; and within the circle of these songs we have impulses from every stage of life, from the perturbations of youth to the chill of age. To every shade of sentiment and affection; to every change and turn of inward experience, to every oddity and comicality of feeling, he has given a voice of musical and energetic utterance. ”

“ Let no puny-copyist of genius only in its errors and its wanderings, doubly deceive himself—first, by supposing that he has genius, and then, more fatally, deceive himself by inferring that genius has impunity. True, it is, that genius, like charity, covereth a multitude of sins—and for the delight and the beauty which a great soul showers upon the world, the world does abundantly forgive. But, genius does not forgive itself. ”

“ Burns—great in sadness and great in humor; so human in his melancholy, so loving in his laughter. When we hear the pleasant peal of his hearty mirth, our bosoms dilate, until we could embrace our species in affection. When, changing his tone, we feel the breath of his indignation or listen to his cry against oppression, our pulse beats quicker and our blood flows faster. Burns, bard of the brave and fervent soul, destined to move humanity as long as language shall endure ”

“ The courtiers and old councillors united their entreaties, but the duke remained inflexible. Turning to Charomonte, he said,
“You, Carolo, remember with what impatiency of grief we bore our Duchess Clarinda’s death, and how we vowed—not hoping to see her equal—never to make a second choice. We did not know that nature had framed one that did almost excel her, and with oaths, mixed with tears, we swore our eyes should never again be tempted. Charomonte, thou heardest us sware—are those vows, thinkest thou, registered against us in heaven?” ”

“ In the throng of Highland chieftains and border barons, in the full blaze of pride and beauty, he felt within him a humanity beyond the claim of titles; genius had given him a superscription more impressive than device of heraldry; the patent of nobility was written with fire in his heart, and the proud ones of earth became poor before the aristocrat of heaven. In that day of classic propriety, a poet from the plough, full of passionate earnestness, must have been in Edinburgh a startling phenomenon. But nature made herself heard in the very citadel of art ”

“ But with Ole Bull fairly commenced our knowledge of the genius of Northern Europe. The play of the wind through her forests of pines, the glint of her frozen streams, the tenderness of her households, and the solemnity of her faith, seemed to breathe in the wizard tones of his violin; while her integrity was written in the form, the manners, and the very smile of the musician. Then the spirit of her literature began slowly to win its gentle but impressive way to the American heart. ”

“ Tannahill, a lowly spirit of melody and pathos, a sweet voice of truth and tenderness; Hogg, the glorious wizard of the mountains, coming down from his shepherd’s wilderness, his memory peopled with all olden legends, and his fancy teeming with all fairy dreams. Burns, then, though mightiest, is but one of an honorable family; though greatest and grandest among them, they are his kindred; of some he is the heir, of others, he is the progenitor.
Burns is a poet true, as I have said, to nature, and therefore true to art. Burns is not mechanically artificial, but he is patiently artistical. ”

“ In common with his countrymen, he has the cautious innuendo—the sly allusion—the insinuated sarcasm—the shrewd but mocking suggestion—the implied irony—the dextrously concealed and quiet fun—the sober joke—but he goes beyond all this—and has a humor—which can make men of every nation shake their sides—a humor that often unites the broadness of Rabelais with the sentiment of Sterne. Such a humor demands not only extraordinary wealth of imagination, but also, extraordinary force of intellect—a very uncommon fancy and a very strong common sense. ”

“ A clear, sound thinker; with a fervid imagination; possessing a keen sense of the ridiculous; and having a great command over the resources of language, he always wrote to the point, in a racy, nervous style, mingling eloquence and satire by turns, and never, as hackneyed writers so often do, drowning the idea with “excess of words.” His choice of terms was singularly felicitous. He wrote the language as the translators of the Bible wrote it, with a large mixture of Saxon derivations, yet with purity. In invective, as in sarcasm, he was especially powerful. ”

“ Leyton, “although I acknowledge I was wrong to harbor such prejudice against a stranger. Would there was not so much depravity in the world as to warrant my suspicions—but so it is, and upright, noble-minded young men must sometimes suffer for the unprincipled libertinisms of those who best serve the devil by beguiling the purest and fairest of God’s creatures! But I forgive the deception. You were no less a stranger to me as Edward Bartine than as Reuben Richards, and I have learned to love you. Yes, you shall have Lucy, and the pretty white cottage to boot. ”

“ Jenny Lind is not beautiful; she does not take her audiences by storm; she exercises no intoxicating physical magnetism over their sensitive natures. She is not classic either in form or feature, or manner, or style of singing. Her loveliness as a woman, her power as an artist, her grace as a character, lies in expression; and that expression owes its variety and its enchantment to unaffected truth to nature, sentiment and the principles of art. ”

“ Life is a sacred thing, young man—the most precious of human possessions, since it depends on the time which is allowed us whether we shall ever be fit for eternity. To one so young as thyself, scarcely yet entered on thy career as a man, it might be well to remember that modesty is the jewel of youth, and that when so many of the great and good of the land have raised their voices against the oppressions of the mother country, there may be good reason why we, who know but little, should respect them, and listen till we learn. ”

“ Burns has, in an eminent degree, the pathos which springs from contemplation of our mortal life; and not less, that which comes from those solemn questionings of the spirit, to which experience and the Past, give only accusing answers. A man of genius may do wrong; he may lose himself in the mazes of the passions; he may forget himself in the excitement and turbulence of the senses—but all this is at a deadlier cost than it is to any other man. ”

“ But a great statesman, no less than a great poet, discerns the life of things in virtue of having himself a live mind, and, not content with observing men and events, divines events in their principles, and thus reads the future. When he proposes a scheme of legislation, all its results exist in his mind as possibilities, and if an effect is produced not calculated in the conception, he is so far to be accounted a blunderer, not a statesman. Perhaps of all the statesmen that ever lived, Edmund Burke had this power of reading events in principles in the greatest perfection ”

“ In the pathos of love Burns has no superior. What poet in ancient or modern times, short of Shakspeare, has sung with more varied inspiration than Burns, the agitations with which love convulses the heart of man, and breaks the heart of woman? In a few compressed, but simple-meaning lines, he reveals the passion in all its regrets and agony. And here also, we can see the force, the simplicity—the vehement sincerity of his poetry: and we can see exactly the same characteristics in his life. ”

“ No writer within the same compass has grander thoughts or deeper beauty; and, by some magic of the heart, grand thoughts and deep beauty are always allied to melancholy. The canopy of the blue heavens, when not a cloud swims in its brightness, makes our rapture sad: so it does when the stars stud it with ten thousand lights: the mountain’s majesty and the ocean’s vastness subdue our souls to thought, and in this world of ours thought has ever something of the hue of grief. ”