Various

“ Very many of my readers have no doubt in their younger days, when hard pressed with a lesson, walked to school studying as they went, their attention riveted on the book, their feet carrying them along the well-known pathway. Under such circumstances consciousness does not direct progression. Walking in the sleep is only one step beyond this. In the days of Antietam a friend of the writer's, worn out with the forced marching, whilst on guard as a sentinel, erect and soldier-like in posture, slept until the dark lantern of the relief officer appalled him with its sudden flash. ”

“ The thought would bear no hesitation: a thousand jealous "Noes" battled with the suggestion, but Reuben's better self resolved to have its way, and, seizing the opportunity of Adam's head being bent down in his arms, Reuben went swiftly out and along down to the keeper's room, where Eve had been left impatiently awaiting his return.
Although the grating of the hinge roused Adam, he neither stirred nor moved until, satisfied by the unbroken silence that Reuben had left him to himself, he ventured to raise his head. Where could he go? where hide himself from human gaze? ”

“ He was one of those figures which arise here and there in the history of literature—of men intensely penetrated with the spirit of the age in which they live, who are alike bitterly impatient of its follies and its conservatism. They cannot see far into the future, they cannot always estimate the past: their genius is not universal, but it has always something of the vitality of present interest about it, and is subject in no common degree to the errors of contemporary judgment. ”

“ Those who call Heine frivolous and a mocker, simply because he can jest at serious things, can only know him very superficially or else must be ignorant of the real part which humor has to play in the world. Perhaps there never was a writer who shook himself so free of all conventionalities of style. His very mannerisms—and his writings abound in them—have a spontaneity about them, and only become affectations in the innumerable imitations which cluster around all his literary productions. This is his service to literature: his service to posterity was as great. ”

“ Yet the true significance of a book like this can only be felt by one who has studied the literature of letters familiarly and lovingly. To the student of history the mere turning of its pages brings an influx of thoughts and memories, half of pain, half of delight. In the confused medley the keynote of many a strange, melancholy strain is struck. The history of the world is a very sad one, and never seems more sad than when the relics of all the ages are thus jumbled together. Even what was in itself light-hearted and joyous becomes half tragical, because it belongs to the strange old story. ”

“ Bidding Eve good-night, he left the house and walked away, only stopping at the turn of the street to step into the road and cast his wistful gaze up to the window of the room which to him now was as the tomb of his dead love.
An ordinary workingman standing in an obscure street is not a figure to arouse much interest, and Reuben's stolid face gave little index to the varied emotions which surged within his troubled heart. ”

“ The two people upon the Neapolitan steamer had met for the first time in the great dining-room one noon of June. It was at a farmer's dinner of beef, potatoes and dandelion-greens, finished with a sort of machicolated decoration of square pieces of rhubarb pie set beside each plate in saucers—nicked saucers, whereon indigo mandarins floated airily over sky-blue hills on their pious way from one indigo pagoda to another. Dancing vines at the open windows spread quaint, shifting embroidery over the coarse tablecloth, yellow walls and unpainted floor. ”

“ To find the man for whom all this feeling had been conjured up reckless and unconcerned, casting oaths against his ill-luck one moment and cutting jokes at his possible fate the next, jarred upon Reuben terribly, and made him at once decide that it would be worse than useless to urge upon him any necessity for taking thought for his soul when he was so utterly reckless as to what would become of his body. The story Reuben had to tell of himself and Eve, the betrayal, and the suspicions it had aroused against Eve in Adam, merely affected Jerrem as a matter for surprise and curiosity. ”

“ Vengeance grew rank, hatred spread out on all sides: the earth thirsted for his blood, and the air was thick with curses showered on his name. Even Joan turned relentless and flung pity from her heart; while old Zebedee, stung to the quick by the odium brought upon his name, disowned Adam for his son and took God to witness that so long as life remained every farthing he possessed should be spent in saving Jerrem. ”

“ And so it happened that in all his future visits—and every hour that Reuben had to spare was given up to Jerrem—Joan was the theme that threaded all their discourse, and by her power Jerrem's soft heart and softer nature became to Reuben as an open page, wherein he read of actions in which good and bad were so mixed up and jumbled that in the very midst of his reproof and condemnation Reuben was often forced to stand abashed before some act of generous pity which found no echo in his former life. ”

“ It feels no hunger, or if it feels hunger seeks no food. A perfect automaton, it moves when touched, it croaks when stroked, it answers to a multitude of external irritations, but when untouched and left to itself it is as a lifeless clod until the sun dries it up and the winds blow it away.
The fish whose cerebral hemispheres or upper brain has been taken away has, like the frog, all conscious perception blotted out, but, unlike the frog, it is in perpetual motion. ”

“ Life is short and art is long: if to art religion be prefixed, all knowledge of art is at an end. It would be pleasant, no doubt, to tell at a glance what legend or myth is represented on a Greek vase, but meantime we can admire the form. It would be equally pleasant to be able to interpret the painting on a Chinese historical vase, but meantime we can admire the colors. So with Egypt, Persia and Peru: it will be well for the many to get at the industrial secrets of these countries if they never obtain even a glimpse of the underlying religious idea of the craftsman. ”

“ Judged by the strictest tests and soundest canons, one is in doubt whether he should be reckoned as a poet: with the Romans he would have been one, no doubt, but scarcely with the Greeks. But if not a son of heaven, he is a chief among the sons of earth. His intellect is of the keenest, his wit of the sharpest, his passion of the strongest. Every scene, every event, every thought, every feeling, strikes him with electric force and is reproduced with the vividness and intensity of the original impression. ”

“ The heroine at another point, wandering, as the lines suppose, about the ample gardens of the Elizabethan house at twilight, bids her lover come and hear the soft echoes of the cuckoo, but it is only the knocking of the machinist's hammer and the voices of the property-man and the scene-painter, who are working in the "flies" high above the proscenium, that are audible, and not the whistle of a bird. The incongruity which amuses the stranger to the theatrical arcana is unnoticed by the actors, whose profession is made up of anomalies. ”

“ The farms are models of agricultural industry and neatness. Prosperity and thrift are written in large letters all over the cultivated fields and well-cared-for pastures that meet the eye at every turn. Men and women are working together among the grain or in the hay-meadows. A turn in the road brings us to Panazol, a little hamlet with not over twenty houses, yet with a vine-clad toy of a church, and a little shed, New England like, adjoining it, for the convenience of the farmers who come here to mass on Sundays. ”

“ Heine's life was certainly one of unremitting warfare—one long record of personal attacks on his enemies, of broils with his critics, of unblushing license of speech, of undaunted adherence to the ideas for which he lived and wrote—one long cry of protest against the outward conditions of life and society as he found them, which rings in those strange minor tones of feeling that are the keynote of his genius, rising sometimes to an almost childish petulance, and sinking again into chords of the truest pathos. ”

“ Beyond its profitableness the drama has another and powerful fascination for its author. Presupposing that it is competently acted and mounted with the exquisite taste and completeness of detail [Pg 587] that we see at such theatres as the Union Square in New York, the manuscript is touched as by a magician's wand and from a collocation of words becomes a living, visible world, and a beatific, almost deifying, consciousness of creation fills the author as he contemplates the embodied offspring of his brain. ”

“ Cross the dangling, insensitive legs of that man whose back has been broken by some one of the murderous engines of modern civilization, and strike it smartly just below the knee with the edge of the hand, when out flies the leg; or as the patient lies in bed tickle the soles of his feet and see how they are drawn up, although all sensibility has vanished. Such movements as these in the frog or in the man are evidently similar to the wrigglings caused in the ascidian by the contact of an external bit of matter. ”

“ In America and Europe nearly everything is done by machinery: in India nearly everything is made by hand. Whatever is done, therefore, is the expression of a thought; and that art in the East is not trammelled by tradition may be inferred not less from the variety of its productions than from the Indianizing process to which foreign arts are subjected. The hand leaves almost unconsciously the impress of the workman's individuality. There is room there for patronage to lead to superexcellence. ”

“ It is long since the connoisseur of Indian art awakened from the dream that India has been an isolated country. The fact is, that it lies in the way of all commerce between the far East and the West, and that it can be, and has been, approached as easily from land as from the sea. ”

“ Literary ability alone will not make an acting play, even when it is wedded to the constructive faculty and dramatic instinct; and we often see a novelist whose characters are forcibly contrasted and whose climaxes are thrilling failing in stage-work, because he makes the fatal mistake of supposing that it can be done by the same methods as his stories. In a novel the author may be explanatory and analytical, telling how, why and wherefore, while in the play he must be concise, suggestive and synthetical, making his characters define themselves by emotion and action rather than by words. ”

“ I question if there can be found a civilized people that takes less interest in literature and literary workers than do Americans. Congress, that intensely practical body, has persistently refused to protect or encourage them, reasoning, evidently, that while the author [Pg 639] may be a pleasing and graceful ornament to the kingly power, he is a useless appendage to a republic. Again, it is not for the interest of a publisher to encourage American authors, whom he must pay for their work, for he has the cream of English literature at his command without money and without price. ”

“ So it has come to be acknowledged that, with all the goodwill in the world for putting on modern airs, there are tumble-down, straggling, rickety relics of the past in Limoges which no amount of municipal resolutions or appropriations—nothing, in fact, but an earthquake—can ever remove. Every lover of the antique and quaint will fervently pray that no such disaster may ever come to efface the curious reminders of a time gone by. ”

“ It seems as if literature in its proper sense had lost something by Heine's personal enlistment in all the conflicts of his day—as if the man of ideas had tried to approach too closely and too curiously to the realities of life, and had only succeeded in bringing into glaring prominence the irreconcilable nature of the forces at work in the world and in ourselves ”

“ She seemed somehow much smaller and paler, more faded and wrinkled, than before, when the donkey-woman laughed again. That unlovely creature said, with witch-like laughter, "You told Antonia that you loved her better than Giuseppe ever could—that you would marry her and make her a signora who should wear a gold ring and have shoes for every day. You went away saying that you would come back when you had sold your pictures. You have not come back until to-day, and you come back to laugh at poor Antonia for being such a fool as to believe a foreign signor would tell the truth to an island-girl." ”

“ But there are some things that no amount of outlay or engineering can accomplish; and though many costly improvements have been made in modernizing Limoges and bringing it up to a realizing sense of its dignity as the great porcelain-manufacturing city of Europe, there are yet within its walls some streets so crooked that nothing short of total demolition will ever straighten them, and others so steep and rocky that enough nitro-glycerine to shake down a hundred neighboring houses would have to be employed to level them. ”