Various

“ Already had they reached the ante-chamber leading to my apartment. They were muttering together in low whispers. I sprang up, and bolted and barred the door, and, as I did so, became aware that some one was endeavoring to open it on the other side. I scarce dared breathe, lest my very breath should betray me. I heard by their voices that they were Poles. As my unlucky stars would have it, I must needs study a little Polish, by way of qualifying myself for my official duties; and I could detect the words "blood," "death," and "Prussians." My knees quaked, cold drops started to my brow. ”

“ How many pictures have failed in expressing the full thoughts of the artist, because he has had a cold at that critical stage of the work when all his faculties of head and hand should have been at their best to insure the fit execution of his design! How many bad bargains have been made, how many opportunities lost in business, because a cold has laid its leaden hand upon them, and converted into its own dull nature what might have resulted in a golden harvest! How many poems—but no: poetry can have nothing in common with a cold. ”

“ She said to Maurice, "I love you—I am happy—and I thank you for it!" The old gray house was the only scene of these interviews. Ursula worked with unabated diligence, and never left her parents. But the walls of that narrow dwelling no longer confined her soul: it had risen to freedom, and taken its flight. The sweet magic of hope brightens not only the future, but the present, and through the medium of its all-powerful prism changes the coloring of all things. The old house was as mean-looking and gloomy as ever, but one feeling, enshrined in the heart of a woman, changed it to a palace. ”

“ But it is not given to selfishness alone to transform itself so well into an appearance of charity; selfishness restricts itself, while charity diffuses itself; without doubt there is prudence in it, but there is also virtue, without doubt Old England, the veritable patrician republic under her frontispiece of monarchy, feels that the stones of her feudal edifice are becoming disjoined, and might tumble under the blast of the age, if she did not bind them together every day by the cement of her institutions in favor of her people. ”

“ Armed with his sponge and his portable bath, a man may go through life, defying some of its worst evils. Self-dubbed a Knight of the Bath, he may look down with scorn upon the red ribbons and glittering baubles of Grand Crosses and Commanders, and may view with that calm philosophy to which nothing so much contributes as a state of high health the chances and changes of a surrounding world of indigestions and catarrhs. With his peptic faculties, in that state of efficiency in which the daily cold effusion will maintain them, he will enjoy his own dinners ”

“ Spring came; and in the narrow lane the ice changed into moisture; then the damp gradually dried up, and a few blades of grass began to appear beneath the rampart wall. Even in this gloomy passage there were tokens of awakening life, but the gray house remained silent and sad as before. Passing by it, as usual, in the beginning of June, I remarked, placed on the window-sill of the open casement, a glass containing a bunch of violets. "Ah," thought I, "there is a soul here!"
To love flowers, one must either be young, or have preserved the memories of youth. ”

“ A childless mother and forsaken wife, Elizabeth the Empress resembled no longer the bright Louisa of Baden, the object of Alexander's first love, the princess who had shed tears of happiness when the joyful start and impassioned look of her lover had assured the Empress Catharine how willingly he accepted the hand of the princess she had destined for him. The heart of the wife had never swerved from her devotion; her love had increased with time, but she knew not how to share his affections with a rival. ”

“ Generally speaking, the shawl is not their forte, in fact they are rather afraid of it. They acknowledge its comfort and convenience for the open carriage, or the sea-side promenade, but rarely recognize it for what it is, a garment capable of appearing the most feminine and graceful in the world. They are too often oppressed by a heap of false notions on the subject; have somehow an idea that a shawl is "old" or "dowdy;" and yet have a dim comprehension that the costly shawls which they more frequently hear of than see, must have some unimagined merits to prove an excuse for their price. ”

“ Every one has a temple to God, where every one can recognize the light of reason, and adore that God, and serve him with his brothers in the sincerity, and in the independence of his faith. Yes, there is, if you will, at the same time, prudence, well-understood selfishness, and public virtue in the acts of England, in order to prevent a social war. Let it be whatever you like; but would that it pleased God that plebeian and proprietary France could also see and comprehend its duty to the people! Would that it pleased God that she could take a lesson from that intelligent aristocracy! ”

“ The innumerable railways which run in every direction all over England have covered the land with stations, coal depôts, new houses for the persons employed, elegant offices for the administration, viaducts, bridges over the lines to private properties; and all these things impart to England, from the sea to London, the appearance of a country which is being cleared, and where the occupants are employed in running up residences for themselves. Every thing is being built, and every thing is smoking, hurrying on, so perfectly alive is this soil ”

“ Kinkel does rise with these events, and his wife, so far from restraining him, feels the same enthusiastic patriotism, and exhorts him to step forward, and swell the torrent of the time. He feels strongly that Prussia should have a constitution; that her intellect and sober character deserves a constitutional monarchy, like ours in England, with such improvements as ours manifestly needs, and he places himself at the head of the popular party in Bonn, where he delivers public orations, the truthful eloquence and boldness of which startle, delight, and encourage his audiences. ”

“ If I be always polite to the living, still more so am I to the dead. I was about to retire as gently as I could, when a parting glance at the coffin showed me that its hapless occupant was no other than the tax-collector, Burkhardt, who had been called on, poor fellow, in his turn, to discharge that great tax so peremptorily demanded of us by that grim collector Death. There he lay regardless alike of flagon or dice box, calm and composed as though he had never shared in the joys or cares of this life. ”

“ Maurice stopped, exchanged a few words with us both, and then took his leave. But from that time he constantly passed through the narrow alley, and paused each time for a moment to salute Ursula. One day, accompanied by me, he entered her house.
There are hearts in this world so unaccustomed to hope, that they can not comprehend happiness when it comes to them. Enveloped in her sadness, which, like a thick vail, hid from her sight all external things, Ursula neither saw nor understood. She remained under the eyes of Maurice as under mine—dejected and resigned. ”

“ If our neighbor be a slanderer, a screw, a giver of bad dinners, or any other sort of criminal for whom the law has provided no punishment and a bag-pipe serenade be your mode of revenge on him, shut him up with a piper or pipers in the padded room in Bedlam, or take him out to the Eddystone lighthouse; but for the love of mercy, do not make us, his unoffending neighbors, partakers of his probably just, but certainly condign punishment!
We have, however, a better opinion of human nature than to believe in such extreme vindictiveness. ”

“ No one was coming or going at this moment; for Popples is but a little dorf, and the traffic is far from numerous, even at the busiest hours. Now, there was a peculiar charm in the clear shining solitude of the scene, which gave us, at once, an impression of loneliness combined with the brightest paths of life and activity.
And yet we gradually began to feel we should like to see somebody—student or peasant—come sliding his way from Popplesdorf. It was evidently the best, and indeed the correct mode for our own course to the frozen moat of the castle. ”

“ Very far from feeling afflicted or humiliated at this fine spectacle of the operation of so many really popular works, which give to England at the present moment an incontestable pre-eminence in this respect over the rest of Europe, and over us, I rejoiced at it. To asperse one's neighbor is to lower one's self. The rivalries between nations are paltry and shameful when they consist in denying or in hating the good that is done by our neighbors. ”

“ On the great clock of the Revolution—while Danton struck the reverberating hours—while Robespierre crept cautiously but surely, like the minute-hand, to his object—Marat was the everlasting "tick-tick" of the smaller hand, counting, like a death-watch, the quick seconds of murder. He never rested; he never slumbered, or walked through his part; he fed but to refresh himself for revolutionary action; he slept but to breathe himself for fresh displays of revolutionary fury. Milder mood, or lucid interval, there was none in him. The wild beast, when full, sleeps ”

“ This new London, which is almost rural, creeps already up these large hills, and spreads itself, from season to season, in the fields which environ them, to go by lower, more active, and more smoky suburbs, to rejoin, as far as the eye can see, the Thames, beyond which the same phenomenon is reproduced on the hills and in the plains on the other side. In surveying this the eye loses itself as if on the waves of the ocean. On every side the horizon is too narrow to embrace that town, and the town continues beyond the horizon ”

“ In literature, in science, in art, we find Germany quite on a level with the present age. She has produced men and books equal to the men and books of England or France, as the names of Goethe, Schiller, Humboldt, Liebig, and a score of others bear testimony. But while in poetry, philosophy, and science, she is on a par with the best portions of modern Europe; in politics—in the practical science of government—she is an indefinite number of centuries behindhand. ”

“ Richard Penderel, having consented to attend him in the capacity of a guide, conducted him first to his own house, Hobbal Grange, "where the old good-wife Penderel had not only the honor to see his majesty," pursues our authority, "but to see him attended by her son." A greater honor far, it was for her to feel that she was the mother of five sons, whom all the wealth of England would not have bribed, nor all the terrors of a death of torture intimidated, to betray their fugitive sovereign to those who thirsted for his blood. ”

“ A short inscription, almost hidden by the foliage of the vine, tells that Milton once lived within those sacred walls. The cottage has been so seldom visited, is so little desecrated by thronging admirers, and has suffered so little from alteration or decay, and all about it has so exactly the serene and tranquil aspect that one should expect to see in an English village two centuries ago, that it requires but a slight effort of fancy to image to ourselves the old blind bard still sitting in that little parlor, or sunning himself on the garden-seat beside the well. ”

“ For three long years the girl had shared Edmund Thornley's apartments, in the strangely-blended capacities of mistress and valet. That a maid-of-all-work in a solitary farm-house, who was eighteen, could scarcely read, and had a cross stepmother, should have been induced to enter on such a course by a man so far her superior in fortune and education, not to speak of eight years' seniority, must be matter of marvel to those only whose wisdom and virtue are of the untried sort. ”

“ A statesman sought in despair a refuge against the difficulties which he saw accumulating on his country, and which he could no longer dominate but by force. I avow that I myself, at that time young and a foreigner, and not yet knowing either the solidity or the elasticity of the institutions and the manners of England, was deceived, like every body else, by these sinister symptoms of a fall, and that I prognosticated, as every body else also did, the approaching decline and fall of that great and mysterious country. ”

“ So well had Berthier planned and executed this agreeable surprise for the disconsolate princess, whom he had found weeping over all that had been endeared to her by the fondest associations, that she never suspected his design in delaying their departure from Vienna.
"Come in, Berthier," said the emperor, opening a side door, "and let the empress thank you. There, Louisa, thank him—embrace him who planned this pleasure for you."
How frequently genius effects great ends by the simplest means! It is most interesting to see the greatest difficulties give way before its magic influence. ”

“ I except, it must be understood, from this very general character of harmony and reconciliation, two classes of men whom nothing ever satisfies—the demagogues and the extreme aristocrats—two tyrannies which can not content themselves with any liberty, because they eternally desire to subjugate the people—the one by the intolerance of the rabble, the other by the intolerance of the little number. The newspapers of the inexorable aristocracy, and of the ungovernable radicalism, are the only ones that still contrast by their bitterness with the general mildness of opinions in Great Britain. ”

“ I took the arm of Maurice, and led him toward Ursula's abode. It was one of those soft, calm autumn evenings, when the still trees are colored by the rays of the setting sun, and every thing breathes repose. It is a time when the soul is softened, when we become better, when we feel ready to weep without the bitterness of sorrow. Ursula, as usual, was seated in the window. ”

“ The Castle of Popplesdorf commands the most beautiful views of some of the most beautiful parts of Rhenish Prussia; and the very best point from which to look at them, is the window of the room that used to be the study of Dr. Gottfried Kinkel. That used to be—and is not now—alas, the day! But we must not anticipate evils; they will come only too soon in their natural course.
In this room, his library and study, we called to see Dr. Kinkel. There he sat—dressing-gown, slippers, and cloud-compelling pipe. ”

“ Do they, from the nature of their business, know too much about the public to think them worth civility, so that nobody has yet discovered a very polite postmaster or man? A strange life the latter leads in our great cities. The truest representative of destiny seems his scarlet coat, seen far through street and lane: at one door he leaves the news of failure and ruin, and at another the intelligence of a legacy. ”

“ The escape of Mary Queen of Scots, from Lochleven Castle, is one of the most striking passages in the history of female royalty. The time, the place, the beauty and exalted rank of the illustrious heroine, her wrongs, and her distress, the chivalry and courage of the gallant spirits who had undertaken to effect her deliverance, the peril of the enterprise, and its success, combine all the elements of a romance. ”