Various

“ The sleeping battery awakes. The silence becomes hideous uproar. The smooth green line of the sod against the sky is lined with marksmen, and in an instant fringed with fire. Then the cannon bellow and the breezeless air is dense with smoke. The attacking column hesitates, trembles, makes a useless effort to advance, and then falls back beyond the bridge. The officers endeavor to rally their men and renew the attack at once, but in vain: flesh and blood cannot stand in such a storm. Nevertheless, the brave fellows—God bless their memory!—halt at length, and form and charge once more. ”

“ But Gautier is a colorist, an artist with words, and he is at his best when he works without much outline, celebrating draperies, bouquets and laces, to all of which he can give a meaning quite other than the milliner's, as where he asserts that the plaits of a rose-colored dress are "the lips of my unappeased desires," or describes March as a barber, powdering the wigs of the blossoming almond trees, and a valet, lacing up the rosebuds in their corsets of green velvet. Whatever he touches he leaves artificial, "enameled," yet charming. ”

“ In "The Boy and the Butterfly," now on the walls of the Century Club-house, the loveliness of the child, the power of action, the subtle management of color and light, are all subordinated to the ideas of defeat and endeavor. Energy, the irrepressible strength of the spirit upheld by a divine light of indestructible youth, shines out from the canvas. The boy who cannot catch the butterfly is transmuted as we stand into the Soul of Beauty reaching out in vain for satisfaction, and ready to follow its aspiration to another sphere. ”

“ None are so fallen that some ray of God's light may not touch them, and this possibility, the faith in light for ever, radiates from the spirit of the artist, and renders him a messenger of joy. No immortal works have bloomed in despondency: they may have taken root in the slime of the earth, but they have blossomed into lilies.
We call this divine power to discern beauty in every manifestation of the Deity, imagination. ”

“ He accepts it as he does the ices, wines and delicate French dishes familiar to his palate. Life is a fountain of eau sucrée, where everything is sweet to him, and he tries to make it so to you, for he is a kindly-natured, true-hearted, valiant little French gentleman. His loves, his innocent dissipations, his grand passions, his rapier duels, would fill the volumes of a Le Sage or a Cervantes. In the gay circles of New Orleans he floats with lambent wings and irresistible fine eyes, its serenest butterfly, admired and spoiled alike by the French and American element. ”

“ But truth, character, skill, the many gifts and great labor which must unite to lead an artist to the foot of his shadowy, sun-crowned mountain, can then carry him no step farther unless ideal Beauty join him, and he comprehend her nature and follow to her height. Again we quote from Charles Blanc—for why should we rewrite what he says so ably?—"All the germs of beauty are in Nature, but it belongs to the spirit of man alone to disengage them. When Nature is beautiful, the painter knows that she is beautiful, but Nature knows nothing of it. ”

“ On the other hand, his love of beauty and his power of expressing it should be studied in its direct influence. The beauty of flesh and blood, even the loveliness of children, seems to have slight hold upon him, compared with the significance of character and the lustre with which his imagination endows everything. This lustre is a distinguishing power with him. The depth to which he sees and feels causes him to give higher lights and deeper shadows than other men. White flowers are not only white to him—they shine like stars. ”

“ Probably no man in all the States could have been found who would have presented a greater contrast to the man standing guard outside the tent than this man who lay within it; and for that reason none who would have been so welcome to Fournier. As the one was a pure savage, the other was the realization of the most illustrious enlightenment; the one fierce, cunning, undisciplined, the other gentle, frank, considerate; as the one was hideous, ill-formed and black as night, so the other was radiant with manly beauty and fair as the morning. Each among his own people sprang from noble stock ”

“ Painting is then, from this point of view, the essential art of Christianity.... If the painter, like Phidias or Lysippus, had only to portray the types of humanity, the majesty of Jupiter, the strength of Hercules, he might do without the riches of color, and paint in one tone, modified only by light and shade; but the most heroic man among Christians is not a demigod: he is a being profoundly individual, tormented, combating, suffering, and who throughout his real life shares with environing Nature, and receives from every side the reflection of her colors. ”

“ The artist who idealizes her discovers in her or imprints upon her the image of beauty: this last is a great master.... Placed between Nature and the ideal, between what is and what must be, the artist has a vast career before him in order to pass from the reality he sees to the beauty he divines. If we follow him in this career, we see his model transform itself successively before his eyes.... But the artist must give to these creations of his soul the imprint of life, and he can only find this imprint in the individuals Nature has created. ”

“ Rayne?"
"Yes, if she had Rhoda's soul inside of her," said Frank stoutly.
"I shouldn't."
"Why not?"
"Because all sorts of eyes gloat on her beauty and drink it in, and in one way appropriate it to themselves. Mr. Rayne is as proud of the admiration given to his wife as if it were a personal tribute to his own taste in selecting her. A beautiful woman never really and truly belongs to her husband unless he can keep a veil over her face, as the Turks do." ”

“ Behold the student of science a wanderer—sailing his yacht among the islands of the Mediterranean; making long journeys through the wild mountain-regions and lovely valleys of untraveled Spain; stemming the historic current of the Nile; among the nomad tribes, in Arab costume riding an Arabian mare, as wild an Arab as the wildest of them; killing tigers in India, tending stock in Australia, chasing buffaloes in Western America,—everywhere avoiding civilization and courting Nature and the company of men who either by birth or adoption were the children of Nature. ”

“ In New Orleans it is the natural, full-flavored article, lively with French taste and talent, and for a people instinct with a truer Gallic spirit, perhaps, than that of Paris itself. It is antique and colonial, but age and the sea-voyage have preserved more distinctly the native bouquet of the wine after all grosser flavors have wasted away. The spectacle within the theatre on a fine night is brilliant, recherché and French. From side-scene to dome, and from gallery after gallery to the gay parquette, glitters the bright, shining audience. ”

“ Hegel has said with admirable wisdom: 'In sculpture and architecture forms are rendered visible by exterior light. In painting, on the contrary, matter, obscure in itself, has within itself its internal element, its ideal—light: it draws from itself both clearness and obscurity. Now, unity, the combination of light and dark, is color.' The painter, then, proposes to himself to represent, not bodies with their real thickness, but simply their appearance, their image ”

“ The sleep under the thatched roof of Pepe Garcia, though somewhat less sound than that of the Three Magi in their tomb at Cologne, lasted until a ray of the morning sun had penetrated the open-work walls of the hut. The colonel rapidly dressed himself, and aroused the others. A disquieting silence reigned around the modest mansions of Chile-Chile. The interpreter was away, Juan of Aragon was away, the muleteers had returned, according to instructions received over-night, to Marcapata with the animals, and the peons were found dead-drunk behind the mud wall of the last house in the village. ”

“ She is rather after the willowy order in her slender person, and when she begins to sing "Rejoice greatly," he looks at her astonished, doubting whether the sound can really have proceeded from her slender throat. He is again reminded of Marion, but by nothing he hears or sees: poor Marion has her not small reputation as a singer in A——, yet her voice, compared with this, is as wire—gold wire indeed—wire with a color of richness at least; while Elise's is as honey itself—honey with the flavor of the sweetest flowers in it, and, too, the suggestion of the bee's swift, strong wing. ”

“ First, pre-eminently appears that worship for moral beauty which suffers him to fear no ugliness. This power allies him with keen sympathy to every living thing. He sees kinship and the immortal spark in each breathing being. The soul of love goes out and paints the dark or the suffering or the repellant faithfully, bringing it in to the light where God's sunshine may fall upon it, and men and women, seeing for the first time, may help to wipe away the stain. ”

“ Sister Benigna said to her companion, "It is time we practiced before an audience perhaps;" and they went on as if nothing had happened.
And sitting in that cool room on the eve of a scorching and distracted day, is it any wonder that Leonhard composed himself to accept any marvel that might present itself? Once across the threshold of the Every-day, and there is nothing indeed for which one should not be prepared. ”

“ In India, a thousand lives thrown away in a day under the wheels of Juggernaut; in Europe, tens of thousands to gratify the imperious wills of grasping monarchs; in America, hundreds to sate the greed of railroad corporations. And now not two men to be had for an experiment of untold value to science, that would scarcely endanger life in one of them, and in the other would necessitate only the merest scratch! ”

“ The Indians, grouped around the flame, seemed like swarthy imps tending the furnace of some fantastic pandemonium. Meanwhile, amidst the constant murmurs of the trees, the nephew of Aragon was heard drawing the notes of some kind of amorous despair from the hollow of his melodious calabash. The examinador and Colonel Perez lulled themselves to sleep with a conversation about the beauties and beatitudes of their wives, now playing the part of Penelopes in their absence. ”

“ These are the beauty of the picture—not rounded flesh, nor graceful curves, nor fair complexion; and so with the singing-girls: they are not beautiful girls, but they are simple—they love to sing, they are full of tenderness and music. We might go over all his pictures to weariness in this way. The young girl plucking at the daisy as she stands in an open field must, however, not be omitted. The natural elegance of this portrait renders it peculiarly, we should say, such a one as any woman would be proud to see of herself. ”

“ Dublin swarms with soldiers, constabulary and police. The metropolitan police is divided into six divisions, each two hundred strong. Its men are, I believe, beyond a doubt the very finest in the world in point of physique. Numbers of them are six feet two or three inches high, and they are broad and athletic in proportion. Indeed, the magnificence of some of them who are detached for duty at certain "great confluences of human existence" is such that you see strangers standing and gaping at the giants in sheer amazement. ”

“ Alcott succeeded in charming out of the lips of a boy six years of age:
"Mr. Alcott! you know Mrs. Barbauld says in her hymns, everything is prayer; every action is prayer; all nature prays; the bird prays in singing; the tree prays in growing; men pray—men can pray more; we feel; we have more, more than Nature; we can know, and do right: Conscience prays; all our powers pray; action prays. ”

“ Strange and incalculable was the engineering of Pepe Garcia. Sometimes, across one of these continually-occurring streams, he would throw a hastily-felled tree, over which, glazed as it was by a night's rain or by the humidity of the forest, he would invite the travelers to pass. Sometimes, to a couple of logs rotting on the banks he would nail cross-strips like the rungs of a ladder, and, while the torrent boiled at a distance below, pass jauntily with his Indians, more sure-footed than goats. The wider the abyss the more insecure the causeway ”

“ Man can then contest with Nature by manifesting thought in the forms of art, as Nature manifests life in her forms. In this sense the philosopher Hegel was able to say that the creations of art were truer than the phenomena of the physical world and the realities of history."
Now, thought in the soul of the true artist for ever labors to evolve the beautiful. This is what the thought of a picture means to him—how to express beauty, which he finds underlying even the imperfect individual of Nature's decaying birth. ”

“ Certainly the treatment benefited Fournier. By and by it did more—it cured him. The cough was forgotten, the cheeks filled out, the muscles became hard as bundles of steel wire, his strength was prodigious: he ate his food with a relish unknown in Paris, and slept like a child.
Nevertheless, his mind, trained to habits of thought and observation, was not idle. When a city was his home he had been a physiologist and had studied man: he made the world his dwelling-place, and wandering among the nations he became an ethnologist and began to study men. ”