Various

“ The ancient spirit is not dead,
that homely and loving groups gather round evening fires, beneath low and smoky rafters, and feel that they have labor and care enough, as their fathers had, but that they have the pride of homes, hearts, and sympathies still.
Let England take care that these are the portion of the English peasant, and he will never cease to show himself the noblest peasant on the face of the earth. Is he not that, in his patience with penury with him, and old age, and the union before him? Is he not that, when his landlord has given him his sympathy? ”

“ He has served his year; he has money in his pocket, his sweetheart on his arm, or he is sure to meet her at the fair. Whether he goes again to his old place or a new one, he will have a week’s holiday. Thus, on old Michaelmas-day, he and all his fellows, all the country over, are let loose, and are on the way to the fair. The houses are empty of them—the highways are full of them; there they go, lads and lasses, streaming along, all in their finery, and with a world of laughter and loud talk. ”

“ The Old Squire and the Young Squire are the antipodes of each other. They are representatives of two entirely different states of society in this country; the one, but the vestige of that which has been; the other, the full and perfect image of that which is. The old squires are like the last fading and shriveled leaves of autumn [Pg 464] that yet hang on the tree. A few more days will pass; age will send one of his nipping nights, and down they will twirl, and be swept away into the oblivious hiding-places of death, to be seen no more. ”

“ Go and work, and make money, I say. I tell you I must get money; right or wrong, I must get it; there’s no living longer, and enduring what I’ve endured. I dream of being rich; I waken every morning from visions where my hands are filled with money; that wakening turns my head, when I know and see there is not a halfpenny in the house, and when I see you, my son, sitting there, working like a fool with pen and brain, but without the power to earn a penny for me. ”

“ For Edward, he was soon pronounced to have recovered entirely, from the shock of these terrible events. Of a courageous and energetic disposition, he pursued the duties of his profession with a firm step, and hid his mighty sorrow deep in the recesses of his heart. To the superficial observer, tears, groans, and lamentations are the only proofs of sorrow; and when they subside, the sorrow is said to have passed away also. Thus the captive, immured within the walls of his prison-house, is as one dead to the outward world, though the jailer be a daily witness to the vitality of affliction. ”

“ I know not when I more deeply felt the happiness and the holiness of existence, the wealth of intellect, and the blessings of our fancies, sympathies, and affection, than I used to do as this singular stranger sate with me on the turf-seat at the vine-covered end of the old cottage, which then made my temporary residence, on the serene evenings of that season, over our rustic tea-table, and with the spicy breath of the wall-flowers of that little garden breathing around us, and held conversation on many a subject of moral and intellectual speculation which then deeply interested me. ”

“ For a week the hurly-burly continues; in pour all the great people to see Tom and Lady Barbara. There are shootings in the mornings, and great dinner parties in the evenings. Tom and my lady have sent down before them plenty of hampers of such wines as the old squire neither keeps nor drinks, and they have brought their plate along with them; and the old house itself is astonished at the odors of champagne, claret, and hook, that pervade, and at the glitter of gold and silver in it. The old man is full of attention and politeness, both to his guests and to their guests ”

“ From this day, a new life was begun in Hans’s house. There he sat at his work; there sat his wife by his side; aiding and contriving with a woman’s wit, a woman’s love, and a woman’s adroitness. She was worth ten journeymen. Work never came in faster; never gave such satisfaction; never brought in so much money; nor, besides this, was there ever such harmony in the house, nor had they ever held such delectable discourse together. There was nothing to conceal. Hans’s thoughts flowed like a great stream ”

“ The living Thompson is, too, the man of his age: for it is an age of awakening enterprise, of wider views, of stronger sympathies. He lives and works, not for himself alone. His motto is Progress; and while the forest whispers to him of the past, books and his own heart commune with him of the future. Such men belong to both. When the present becomes the past, their work will survive them; and their tomb will not be a desert, but the grateful memories of improved men. May they spring up in every hamlet, and carry knowledge and refinement to every cottage fireside! ”

“ The work is too hot to last much longer on the island: to fire upon them there, would be to risk our own men as much as the enemy. See what long flashes of flame break forth among the brushwood: and listen to the cheering now. That was a French cheer! and there goes another! Look! look, the bridge is darkening already! That was a bugle-call, and they are in full retreat. Now, lads—now!”
As I spoke; the gun exploded, and the instant after we heard the crashing rattle of the timber, as the shot struck the bridge, and splintered the wood-work in all directions. ”

“ So the son left the father kneeling by the grave.
Again a few years are passed. It is winter, with a roaring wind and a thick gray fog. The graves in the church-yard are covered with snow, and there are great icicles in the church-porch. The wind now carries a swathe of snow along the tops of the graves, as though the “sheeted dead” were at some melancholy play; and hark! the icicles fall with a crash and jingle, like a solemn mockery of the echo of the unseemly mirth of one who is now coming to his final rest.
There are two graves near the old yew tree; and the grass has overgrown them. ”

“ In his boyish days he had entered the ranks of literature, with the hopes of fame to lead him on, but disappointment after disappointment, and miserable circumstances of poverty and suffering had been his fate: now the vision of fame had become dim in his sick soul—he was writing with the hope of gaining money, any trifle, by his pen.
Of all the ways of acquiring money to which the millions bend their best energies, that of literature is the most forlorn. The artificers of necessaries and luxuries, for the animal existence, have the world as their customers ”

“ In the month of October, 1845, Mary was four years old. That was the bitter time, when first the food of the earth was turned to poison; when the gardens that used to be so bright and sweet, covered with the purple and white potato blossoms, became in one night black and offensive, as if fire had come down from heaven to burn them up. ’Twas a heart-breaking thing to see the laboring men, the crathurs! that had only the one half-acre to feed their little families, going out, after work, in the evenings to dig their suppers from under the black stalks. ”

“ Christopher Thompson was a self-taught painter. He had been tossed about the world in a variety of characters—errand-boy, brickmakers’ boy, potter, shipwright, sailor, sawyer, strolling player; and here he finally settled down as painter, and, having achieved a trade, he turned author, and wrote his life. That life—The Autobiography of an Artisan—is one of the best written and most interesting books of its class that we ever read. It is full of the difficulties of a poor man’s life, and of the resolute spirit that conquers them. ”

“ Long will the accents of that “old man eloquent” linger in their recollection, and their minds retain the impression of that pensive and benevolent countenance. The generation of those who have gazed upon his features will pass away and be forgotten. The marble, like the features which it enshrines, will crumble into dust. Ut vultus hominum ita simulacra vultus imbecilla ac mortalia sunt, forma mentis æterna; the attributes of his mighty intellect are stamped for ever upon his works which will be transmitted to future ages as a portion of their most precious inheritance. ”

“ Publishers run with their unsalable manuscripts, and beg Lady Barbara to have the goodness to put her name on the title, knowing by golden experience that one stroke of her pen, like the point of a galvanic wire, will turn all the dullness of the dead mass into flame. Lady Barbara is not barbarous enough to refuse so simple and complimentary a request; nay, her benevolence extends on every hand. Distressed authors, male and female, who have not her rank, and, therefore, most clearly not her genius, beg her to take their literary bantlings under her wing ”

“ ANDREW CARSON’S MONEY; A STORY OF GOLD. The night of a bitter winter day had come; frost, and hail, and snow carried a sense of new desolation to the cold hearths of the moneyless, while the wealthy only drew the closer to their bright fires, and experienced stronger feelings of comfort.
In a small back apartment of a mean house, in one of the poorest quarters of Edinburgh, a young man sat with a pen in his fingers, endeavoring to write, though the blue tint of his nails showed that the blood was almost frozen in his hands. ”

“ Such are the men that England is now, ever and anon, in every nook and corner of the island, producing. She produces them because they are needed. They are the awakeners who are to stir up the sluggish to what the time demands of them.
The two Thompsons of Sherwood are types of their ages. He of the grave—lies solitary and apart from his race. He lived to earn money—his thought was for himself—and there he sleeps, alone in his glory—such as it is. He was no worse, nay, he was better than many of his contemporaries. ”

“ When benevolent printers shall be found eager to print gratuitously works of unsalable genius, and benevolent paper-merchants to supply paper for the same, publishers may afford to think less of a manuscript as an article of sale—may reject with less freedom unlikely manuscripts, and haggle less savagely about the price of likely ones. An obvious common-place this, and said a thousand times before, but not yet recognized by the world of writers at large. Publishing is a trade, and, like all other trades, undertaken with the one object of making money by it. ”

“ One of the worst features of the times is the growth and spread of upstarts. Old families going down, as well as old customs, and new people, who are nobody, taking their places. Old estates bought up—not by the old gentry, who are scattering their money in London, and among all the grinning monsieurs, mynheers, and signores, on the frogified continent, but by the soap-boilers and sugar-bakers of London. The country gentry, he avers, have been fools enough to spend their money in London, and now the people they have spent it among are coming and buying up all the estates about them. ”

“ The fact is, that reckless publishing is more injurious to the literary profession than any thing in the world beside. The cautious publisher is the author’s best friend. If a house publish at their own risk a number of works which they can not sell, they must either go into the Gazette at last, or make large sums of money by works which they can sell. When a publisher loses money by a work, an injury is inflicted upon the literary profession. The more money he can make by publishing, the more he can afford to pay for authorship. ”

“ We have annihilated legitimacy, it is true, just as the Indians destroy a forest, by burning the trees, but the roots remain, and if the soil is incapable of sending up the giant stems as before, it is equally unable to furnish a new and different culture. Monarchy is just as firmly rooted in a Frenchman’s heart, but he will have neither patience for its tedious growth, nor can he submit to restore what has cost him so dearly to destroy. ”

“ It is free from the preternatural gloom which so often makes elegiac poetry an abomination to every healthy intellect. The tearful bard does not allow himself to be drowned in sorrow, but draws from its pure and bitter fountains the sources of noble inspiration and earnest resolve. No one can read these natural records of a spirit, wounded but not crushed, without fresh admiration of the rich poetical resources, the firm, masculine intellect, and the unbounded wealth of feeling, which have placed Tennyson in such a lofty position among the living poets of England. ”

“ In memory of a youthful friend, who was distinguished for his rare early promise, his ripe and manifold accomplishments, and a strange, magnetic affinity with the genius of the author, these exquisite poems are the gushing expression of a heart touched and softened, but not enervated by deep sorrow. The poet takes a pensive delight in gathering up every memorial of the brother of his affections; his fancy teems with all sweet and beautiful images to show the tenderness of his grief; every object in external nature recalls the lost treasure ”

“ The meadows had also their moist emerald sward scattered with the grass of Parnassus, and an autumnal crocus of a particularly delicate lilac.
At the inn, at the mouth of Birkenau Thal, we proposed to take the eilwagen as far as Auerbach, but that not arriving, we availed ourselves of a peasant’s light wicker wagon. The owner was a merry fellow, and had a particularly spirited black horse; and taking leave of our friends, after a delightful day, we had a most charming drive to Auerbach, and one equally amusing, from the conversation of our driver. ”

“ We have given a taste of Cumming’s Five Years of a Hunter’s Life in the last number of The New Monthly Magazine, from which it will be seen that the writer is a fierce, blood-thirsty Nimrod, whose highest ideal is found in the destruction of wild-beasts, and who relates his adventures with the same eagerness of passion which led him to expatriate himself from the charms of English society in the tangled depths of the African forest. Every page is redolent of gunpowder, and you almost hear the growl of the victim as he falls before the unerring shot of this mighty hunter. ”