Various

“ The valve-line is pulled!—out rushes the gas from the top of the balloon—you see the flag fly upward—down through the clouds you sink faster and faster—lower and lower. Now you begin to see dark masses below—there's the Old Earth again!—the dark masses now discover themselves to be little forests, little towns, tree-tops, house-tops—out goes a shower of sand from the ballast-bags, and our descent becomes slower—another shower, and up we mount again, in search of a better spot to alight upon. ”

“ Will the hopes, the fears, the joys, the vows of lovers, ever be deemed matters of light moment, unworthy to be embalmed and preserved in those immortal caskets which genius knows how to frame out of words? If that dreary time be destined to come—if victory decide in favor of those mechanical philosophers who would drive sentiment out of the world—sad will be the lot of mortals; for it is better to die with a heart full of love, than live for an age without feeling one vibration of that divine passion. ”

“ He declared his belief that, but for the treason of Görgey, the Hungarians could have defeated the united armies of their foes. But the House of Hapsburg, as a dynasty, exists no more. It merely vegetates at the whim of the mighty Czar, to whom it has become the obedient servant. But if England would only say that Russia should not thus set her foot on the neck of Hungary, all might yet be well. Hungary would have knowledge, patriotism, loyalty, and courage enough to dispose of its own domestic matters, as it is the sovereign right of every nation to do. ”

“ In every fortress, at every mountain pass, upon every rapid stream, the Austrians made a stand to arrest the march of the conqueror. But with the footsteps of a giant, Napoleon crowded upon them, pouring an incessant storm of destruction upon their fugitive ranks. He drove the Austrians to the foot of the mountains. He pursued them up the steep acclivities. He charged the tempests of wind and smothering snow with the sound of the trumpet, and his troops exulted in waging war with combined man and the elements. Soon both pursuers and pursued stood upon the summit of the Carnic Alps. ”

“ You have succeeded in organizing the great nation, whose vast territory is circumscribed only because nature herself has fixed its limits. You have done more. The two finest countries in Europe, formerly so renowned for the arts, the sciences, and the illustrious men whose cradle they were, see with the greatest hopes genius and freedom issuing from the tomb of their ancestors. I have the honor to deliver to you the treaty signed at Campo Formio, and ratified by the emperor. Peace secures the liberty, the prosperity, and the glory of the Republic. ”

“ Then will it come together, and as in the poetic imagination of the resurrection of the body, bone meets its fellow-bone, and dust hastens to join once more in living organization with its kindred dust, so in the soul's anastasis will all the lost and scattered thoughts come home again to their spiritual abode, and from the chaos of the past will stand forth forever one fixed and changeless being, the discordant and deformed result of a false and evil life, or a glorious organization in harmony with all that is fair and good in the universe. ”

“ Shouts of "Live Napoleon the conqueror of Italy, the pacificator of Europe, the saviour of France," resounded loud and long. Barras, in the name of the Directory, replied, "Nature," exclaimed the orator in his enthusiasm, "has exhausted her energies in the production of a Bonaparte. Go," said he turning to Napoleon, "crown a life, so illustrious, by a conquest which the great nation owes to its outraged dignity. Go, and by the punishment of the cabinet of London, strike terror into the hearts of all who would miscalculate the powers of a free people. ”

“ It is like the glory of the stars, which shine by borrowed light, each seeming source of which is tributary to one more distant, until the view is lost to us; yet we only know there must be a life-giving centre, and, to the steady mind, though the goal of life be dim and distant, its light is fixed and certain, while all lesser aims are but reflections of this glory in myriad-descending shades, which must be passed, one by one, as the steps of the ladder on which he mounts to Heaven. ”

“ The expansion and contraction which romantic gentlemen fancied took place in the size of their heads, does really take place in the balloon, according as it passes from a cloud of one temperature into that of another.
We are now nearly three miles high. Nothing is to be seen but pale air above—around—on all sides, with floating clouds beneath. How should you like to descend in a parachute?—to be dangled by a long line from the bottom of the car, and suddenly to be "let go," and to dip at once clean down through those gray-blue and softly rose-tinted clouds, skimming so gently beneath us? ”

“ In the face of powerful armies, Napoleon had traversed hundreds of miles of territory. He had forded rivers, with the storm of lead and iron falling pitilessly around him. He had crossed the Alps, dragging his artillery through snow three feet in depth, scattered the armies of Austria to the winds, imposed peace upon that proud and powerful empire, recrossed the Alps, laid low the haughty despotism of Venice, established a popular government in the emancipated provinces, and revolutionized Genoa. Josephine was now with him in the palace of Milan. ”

“ He wears a mustache and imperial, and his curled hair does not entirely cover the upper part of the head. He has a white and delicate hand, the fingers long. He speaks German, Hungarian, Latin, Slovack, a little French and Italian. His bearing when calm, is solemn, full of a certain dignity; his movements elegant, his voice agreeable, softly penetrating, and very distinct, even when he speaks low. He produces, in general, the effect of an enthusiast; his looks often fixed on the heavens; and the expression of his eyes, which are fine, contributes to give him the air of a dreamer. ”

“ Fuller, and clearer, and higher, grows the light of hope, until all around him, and above him, is filled with the benign glory of its presence. He dares once more look upward, and as he does so, he beholds beaming upon him the countenance of his watching friend, bending over him with the announcement that the crisis is past, and that coolness is once more returning to his burning frame. Only a prolonged dream, it might perhaps be said. But dreams in general run parallel with the movement of outward time, or if they do go beyond it, it is never by any such enormously magnified excess. ”

“ Green had taken up one friend with him in the car; and, knowing well what would happen the instant so great a weight as the parachute and man were detached, he had provided a small balloon inside the car, filled with atmospheric air, with two mouth-pieces. They were now upward of a mile high.
"How do you feel, Mr. Cocking?" called out Green. "Never better, or more delighted in my life," answered Cocking. Though hanging at fifty feet distance, in the utter silence of that region, every accent was easily heard. "But, perhaps you will alter your mind?" suggested Green. ”

“ My occupation there was as a species of secretary to the court, an office quite new to the villagers, but which served to impress them more reverentially than ever in favor of this rude justice. My legal duties over, I became a vine-dresser, a wood-cutter, or a deer-stalker, as season and weather dictated. My evenings being always devoted to the task of a schoolmaster. A curious seminary was it, too, embracing every class from childhood to advanced age, all eager for knowledge, and all submitting to the most patient discipline to attain it. ”

“ And yet there are none, perhaps, that enter more into the musings of that common philosophy which is for all minds, for all ages, and for all conditions in life. Who has not thought on the enigma of time and space, each baffling every effort the mind may make for its pure and perfect conception without some aid from the notion of its inseparable correlative? Where is the man, or child even, who has not been drawn to some contemplation of that wondrous stream on whose bosom we are sailing, but of which we can conceive neither origin nor outlet ”

“ I had the love and esteem of all around me; there was neither a harassing doubt for the future, nor the rich man's contumely to oppress me; my life was made up of occupations which alternately engaged mind and body, and, above all and worth all besides, I had a sense of duty, a feeling that I was doing that which was useful to my fellow-men; and however great may be a man's station in life, if it want this element, the humblest peasant that rises to his daily toil has a nobler and a better part. ”

“ I will relate the story of Gadallah, the son of the sword-maker, and of Hosneh, the daughter of the merchant. It is handed down to us by tradition, and the fathers of some yet living, remember to have heard it told by eye-witnesses. Not that any great weight of testimony is required to exact belief. No extraordinary incident befell the lovers; and the pure-hearted, when they hear these things, will say within themselves, "This must be so; we would have done likewise."
Gadallah was a youth of wonderful beauty; his like is only to be seen once in a long summer's day, by the favor of God. ”

“ Feeling nothing of the ascending motion, the first impression that takes possession of you in "going up" in a balloon, is the quietude—the silence, that grows more and more entire. The restless heaving to and fro of the huge inflated sphere above your head (to say nothing of the noise of the crowd) , the flapping of ropes, the rustling of silk, and the creaking of the basketwork of the car—all has ceased. There is a total cessation of all atmospheric resistance. You sit in a silence which becomes more perfect every second. ”

“ Pettipo is under the necessity of believing that his little finger wags, and that it is endowed with the gift of sensation, though he in fact knows nothing whatever of the why or the wherefore.
We must believe a thousand things that we can not understand. Matter and its combinations are a grand mystery—how much more so, Life and its manifestations. Look at those far-off worlds majestically wheeling in their appointed orbits, millions of miles off: or, look at this earth on which we live, performing its diurnal motion upon its own axis, and its annual circle round the sun! ”

“ Moby Dick is the name of an old White Whale; half fish and half devil; the terror of the Nantucket cruisers; the scourge of distant oceans; leading an invulnerable, charmed life; the subject of many grim and ghostly traditions. This huge sea monster has a conflict with one Captain Ahab; the veteran Nantucket salt comes off second best; not only loses a leg in the affray, but receives a twist in the brain; becomes the victim of a deep, cunning monomania; believes himself predestined to take a bloody revenge on his fearful enemy; pursues him with fierce demoniac energy of purpose ”

“ At that moment, when I was almost maddened by insupportable apprehension into starting up to meet, perhaps, certain destruction, something sprang upon my shoulder—upon the reptile! There was a shrill cry from the new assailant, a loud, appalling hiss from the serpent. For an instant I could feel them wrestling, as it were, on my body; in the next, they were beside me on the turf; in another, a few paces off, struggling, twisting round each other, fighting furiously, I beheld them—a mungoos or ichneumon and a cobra di capello! ”

“ Have we not slain enough of our fellow-men? Have we not inflicted a sufficiency of woes upon suffering humanity? It demands repose upon all sides. Europe, which took up arms against the French Republic, has laid them aside. Your nation alone remains hostile, and blood is about to flow more copiously than ever. This sixth campaign has commenced with sinister omens. Whatever may be its issue, many thousand men, on the one side and the other, must perish. And after all we must come to an accommodation, for every thing has an end, not even excepting the passion of hatred. ”

“ Would he pour golden truth upon the page of life? he must seek it from every source, weigh the relations of life, and concede to its taste, that he may best apply it, for the proverb must be written in fair round hand, that common men may read it. Would he picture the life of man or nature? he must go forth with heart and eye alive, nor turn from the sorest notes of human woe, or the coarsest tones of vice; he must watch the finest ray of light, and mark the falling of the last withered leaf. ”

“ Kossuth occupies a position peculiarly his own, whether we regard the circumstances of his rise, or the feelings which have followed him in his fall. Born in the middle ranks of life, he raised himself by sheer force of intellect to the loftiest place among the proudest nobles on earth, without ever deserting or being deserted by the class from which he sprung. He effected a sweeping reform without appealing to any sordid or sanguinary motive. No soldier himself, he transformed a country into a camp, and a nation into an army. ”

“ They met in the holy cause of benevolence and human sympathy, to battle with the elements beneath the Arctic Circle; and the chivalric heroism which the few stout hearts of the two nations displayed in that terrible conflict, redounds a thousand-fold more to the glory of the actors, their governments, and the race, than if four-score ships, with ten thousand armed men had fought for the mastery of each other upon the broad ocean, and battered hulks and marred corpses had gone down to the coral caves of the sea, a dreadful offering to the demon of Discord. ”

“ Do not imagine that I deny the possibility of saving Austria by the force of arms. But even in such an event your country will not be the less ravaged. As for myself, if the overture which I have the honor to make, shall be the means of saving a single life, I shall be more proud of the civic crown which I shall be conscious of having deserved, than of all the melancholy glory which military success can confer. ”

“ Napoleon resolved to march directly upon Vienna. His object was peace, not conquest. In no other possible way could peace be attained. It was a bold enterprise. Leaving the whole breadth of Italy between his armies and France, he prepared to cross the rugged summits of the Carnic Alps, and to plunge, with an army of but fifty thousand men, into the very heart of one of the most proud and powerful empires upon the globe, numbering twenty millions of inhabitants. Napoleon wished to make an ally of Venice. To her government he said, "Your whole territory is imbued with revolutionary principles. ”

“ He abolished aristocracy, and established a popular government, which should fairly represent all classes of the community. The public debt was regarded as sacred, and even the pensions continued to the poor nobles. It was a glorious reform for the Venetian nation. It was a terrible downfall for the Venetian aristocracy. The banner of the new republic now floated from the windows of the palace, and as it waved exultingly in the breeze, it was greeted with the most enthusiastic acclamations, by the people who had been trampled under the foot of oppression for fifteen hundred years. ”

“ These fancies are not less ingenious and comical than that of the sailor who hit upon the means of using a balloon to make a rapid voyage to any part of the earth. "The earth spins round," said he, "at a great rate, don't it? Well, I'd go up two or three miles high in my balloon, and then 'lay to,' and when any place on the globe I wished to touch at, passed underneath me, down I'd drop upon it."
But we are still floating high in air. How do we feel all this time? "Calm, sir—calm and resigned." ”