Various

“ Reed often says. “His closeness to nature and life hold you in spite of yourself. There is hardly a book of his which is not sad beyond tears. ‘Eugénie Grandet’ is a most powerful delineation of the absorbing grasp which love of money has on a strong man, and the power which love has over an untutored spirit, but sadness permeates everything. That wonderful love story of the ‘Duchess de Langais’ is like no other love story ever written. ”

“ Hugh Brontë was an Irish Hakkawāti, the last of an extinct race. I knew several men who had heard him when he was at his best. He would sit long winter nights in the logie-hole of his corn-kiln, in the Emdale cottage, telling stories to an audience of rapt listeners who thronged around him. Mrs. Brontë plied her knitting in the outer darkness of the kitchen, for there was no light except the glow from the furnace of the kiln, which lighted up old Hugh’s face as he beeked the kiln, and told his yarns. ”

“ He offers all the money which the emperor never fails to send as a reward, to say nothing of the glory. I’ll wager a florin that he’ll offer in vain! But come, let us be going. There’s too much work to be done, to be loitering here.”
Twice before on that day, once in the early morning, and again at noon, had the boy stood as if spellbound, with his eyes riveted on the beautiful spire. And now the setting of the sun had found him a third time at his post. The Platz was deserted, but the streets beyond were thronged with people hurrying to their homes. ”

“ The picture is neither that of a Brontë of the Haworth vicarage nor is it a portraiture of the flower plucked in Ballynaskeagh by Hugh Brontë, but it is Alice McClory diluted with a dash of the Penzance Branwells, and the effect is a perfect and beautiful picture, more pleasing, indeed, than a life-like portrait, with all the radiant beauty of the charming Alice, when she rode off to Magherally Church with the dashing Hugh Brontë. ”

“ In their wedded love they were very poor, but very happy. Hugh’s constant, steady work provided for the daily wants of an ever-increasing family, but it made no provision for the strain of adverse circumstances. In fact, the Emdale Brontës lived like birds, and as happy as birds.
Hugh Brontë was one of the industrious poor. The salt of his life was honest, manly toil. He had forgotten the luxury of his childhood’s home, and he did not feel any degradation in his lowly lot.
In our artificial civilization we have come to place too much store on the accident of wealth. ”

“ The psychological laboratory sprang first from no single mind; not wholly from science nor yet from philosophy, but from an age. In 1860 Gustave Theodore Fechner, the godfather of experimental psychology, published his famous Law. Fechner was as much a mystic as a scientist. His Law was, perhaps, the first great impetus to active psycho-physical experimentation. The prospects now are, however, that this Law will stand, a halfway truth, beside Newton’s erroneous theory of 409 light, rather than, as was at first claimed for it, beside the Law of Gravity, a great primary law of nature. ”

“ Its owner having shown his pride in that beautiful ivy, straightway took me to the roof of the house, to admire the superb view of Casco Bay and the picturesque expanse of country around Portland.
The stamp of the man’s character is plain everywhere in that house. The rooms are large, airy, and unpretentiously furnished, yet with solidity and that certain winning grace of domestic appointments in old New England. Much of Mr. Reed’s work is done at his desk in a wee bit of a room on the second floor, where crowded book-shelves reach to the ceiling. ”

“ The Hakkawāti is the oriental story-teller, the man who beyond all others relieves the tedium and wearisomeness of oriental life. I have often watched the oriental Hakkawāti, seated in the centre of a large crowd, weaving stories with subtile plots and startling surprises, using pathos and passion and pungent wit, and always interspersing his narratives with familiar incidents, and laying on local color, to give an appearance of vraisemblance, or reality, to the wildest fancies. ”

“ He further declared that a just and wise legislature should secure to every man, high and low, the fruits of his own labor, and he maintained that such simple, natural justice would produce confidence in Ireland, and that confidence would beget content and industry, and that a contented and industrious people would soon learn to love both king and country, and make Ireland happy and England strong. Just laws would silence the agitator and the blunderbuss, and range the people on the side of the rulers. ”

“ He planted himself to resist the shock, but it was irresistible; he, too, was torn from his foothold, and Jenni followed him, and all five found themselves riding downwards, with uncontrollable speed, on the back of an avalanche, which a single slip had started.
“Turn on your face, and grind the point of your axe or baton through the moving snow into the ice”—that is the golden rule for cases of the kind, the only way in which the faller can do anything to arrest his speed. ”

“ There is no difficulty, however, in recognizing the original of the incarnate fiend Heathcliff in the man Welsh, who tormented Hugh Brontë, Patrick’s father, in the old family home near Drogheda. Had Welsh never played the demon among the Brontës, Emily Brontë had never placed on the canvas Heathcliff, “child neither of lascar nor gypsy, but a man’s shape animated by demon life—a ghoul, an afrit.” Nelly Dean, the benevolent but irresolute medium of romance and tragedy, is Hugh’s Aunt Mary, clear-eyed as to right and duty, but ever slipping down before the force of circumstances. ”

“ Everybody knows—vaguely, if not precisely—what an avalanche is. Masses of snow accumulate in winter on the mountain slopes. In spring the warmth loosens their coherence, and they fall into the valleys, sweeping away or burying everything in their track. It is bad for the mountaineer, if he happens to be in the way of one. ”

“ The sorrows of love are sacred, but when they are mixed up with a criminal and a prison there is a feeling—a kind of a feeling—as if, well, one doesn’t like somehow to be mixed up with it. Lily was greatly to be pitied, no doubt; her lover had turned out shameful; but she ought to have given up the man long before he got so bad.
She was alone. The church bells were beginning to ring. She thought she would go to church. While she considered this point, she heard a woman’s step on the stairs, and there was a knock at the door. ”

“ Now, what is expected to come from this new psychology? “Do you fellows expect to invent patent ways of thinking?” was once asked me. Who can tell? Who, before Galileo, would have prophesied that man should weigh the stars or know their chemistry? Yet there is much ground for comparison between the position of physical science then and that of mental science now. ”

“ He laid it down as an axiom that justice must be at the root of all good government, and he declared emphatically what O’Connell and Agent Townsend have since maintained, that the Irish were the most justice-loving people in the world. He also held that unjust laws were the fruitful source of all the turbulence and crime in Ireland.
Justice, he said, was nothing very grand. It meant simply that every man should have his own by legal right. This definition brought him to his tenant-right theory. In illustration he returned to the story of his ancestral home and the wrongs of his ancestors. ”

“ He cannot be all things to all men. He is bound to be true to his personal convictions, and he is not the man to vote for a measure he detests, because his constituents clamor for it. Every one knows how public men have at times voted against their earnest convictions, and then gone into the cloak room and apologized for it; but it would be difficult to imagine a man of Mr. Reed’s composition in this rôle.
To judge a man well, to know his best side, it is necessary to see him at home, and I cull from notes made several weeks ago, during a visit to Mr. Reed in Portland. ”

“ Reed continued, “that I believe there is as much of a rhythm in prose as there is in poetry, and if a man has not the intuitive feeling of that subtile thing, rhythm, he can never amount to anything as an orator. Certain books of George William Curtis—‘Prue and I,’ especially—have helped me as much as anything to realize how delightful a quality rhythm is.”
There is a side to Mr. Reed which few people suspect. He is a lover of good novels, especially such novels as those of Balzac and Thackeray, which present human nature in a rugged, truthful manner. ”

“ Instructor in Psychology, Harvard University.
Editor’s Note.—The illustrations of this article are from photographs, specially taken for the Harvard University Exhibit at the World’s Fair.
What do they do there?
What do they expect to come out of it?
The notion of a mental laboratory is still a mystery to most persons. They ask themselves the above questions, and many feel as they do so an uncanny shiver. They cannot realize that the study of the mind is already an established natural science, here, at sober Harvard, in all the leading universities, and free of spooks and mediums. ”

“ Hugh Brontë was a great moral teacher and a power for good, as far as his influence extended. There are still some old men living in his neighborhood who never understood him, and who are disposed to think he was in league with the devil.
It is always at his peril that any man dares to live before his time, or to leave the beaten track of the commonplace. The reformers have all, without exception, been mad, or worse, in the eyes of dull conservatism. ”

“ Reed once that it seemed to me as if there must be in the temperament of the debater something of the artist’s nature—a little of the same instinct to inspire and guide him. And I added: “Don’t you, like the artist, draw for material everywhere, from friend and foe alike, from things bearing directly upon your subject as well as from things that are apparently more removed from it? Don’t you have something akin to inspiration?” ”

“ Hugh Brontë preached his revolutionary doctrines of simple justice in the cheerless east wind, but a little seed, carried I know not how, took root in genial soil, and the revolutionary doctrine of “Every man his own,” at which the political parsons used to cry “Anathema,” and the short-sighted politicians used to shout “confiscation,” has become one of the commonplaces of the modern reformation programme of fair play. ”

“ He who loses a place and his character with it never gets another berth. This is a rule in the city. We talk of retrieving character and getting back to work. Neither the one nor the other event ever comes off. The wretch who is in this hapless plight begins the weary search for employment in hope. How it ends varies with his temperament or with the position of his friends. All day long he climbs stairs, puts his head into offices, and asks if a clerk is wanted.
No clerk is wanted. Then he comes down the stairs and climbs others, and asks the same question and gets the same reply. ”

“ Reed, the place of all to study his social side is at his club, The Cumberland.
“You see,” said Mr. Reed, “a club of this kind is only possible in a conservative town like Portland, a staid, old place which grows slowly, at the rate of about five or six hundred a year, where the one hundred club members, while belonging to opposite political parties, unite to a man in celebrating the victory of any of their fellow-members. Most of them, friends from boyhood, have gone to school together, and are known to one another but by 377 their Christian names.” ”