Various

“ The opposite side is hung with many pictures by Rubens; and the contrast between the works of the mighty colorists of Venice and the famous colorist of Antwerp is not without curious interest and instruction. The Venice wall has the color of Venetian sunsets, the gold and crimson of its clouds, the solemn blue of the Cadore hills, the deep green of the lagoons, the brown and purple of the seaweeds, and the shadows of the city of decaying palaces. Here are such harmonies as Nature strikes in her great symphony of color. ”

“ Giotto stands at the threshold of the fourteenth century, breaking open the door, so long barred up, that was to let men into the glories of the unseen world. The friend of Dante, he, as painter, stands side by side with the poet. In the midst of the tumults, the confusion, and violence of those bloody times, his soul rose above the discord of the world, his hand snapped the fetters of authority and tradition, and revealed by line and color the exalted visions of his imagination. Painting, with him, took its inspiration from religious faith, and spent itself in religious service. ”

“ The permanent interest of every man is, never to be in a false position, but to have the weight of Nature to back him in all that he does. Riches and poverty are a thick or thin costume; and our life—the life of all of us—identical. For we transcend the circumstance continually, and taste the real quality of existence; as in our employments, which only differ in the manipulations, but express the same laws; or in our thoughts, which wear no silks, and taste no ice-creams. We see God face to face every hour, and know the savour of Nature. ”

“ Smoke, steam, coal-dust, blackened walls, and bare fields lie outside the Exhibition; and now let us go within.
The world could show no sharper and more affecting contrast. Outside, all suggests the competitions and struggles of trade, the crowded street, the bustle of the exchange, the cold and dry elements of purely unimaginative life. Inside, all suggests the quietness and composure of solitary and delightful labor, the silence of the studio, the resort to nature, and the frequenting of the springs of poetry. From the present, one is suddenly transferred to the past ”

“ There are noble pictures here by Giorgione, and Titian, and Tintoret, and Paul Veronese, and Bonifazio. Look at this Musical Party by Giorgione, this landscape by Titian, this portrait of the vile Duke of Alva by the same great master, the greatest master of all in portraiture. It is the Duke himself, not merely in his outward presence, but such as the insight of one as profoundly versed in human as in external nature beheld him. The portrait is a biography of the man, and one may read in the narrow, hard, and wily face the history of his cruel life. ”

“ There is one, among the four pictures ascribed to Fra Angelico in this collection, from which something of the heavenly purity, the sweetness, and the tenderness of this great and gentle master may be learned. It is a picture of the Last Judgment. Unfortunately, it has been much injured by time and by neglect; its brilliant colors have sunk and become dim,—those pure, clear colors which give to Fra Angelico's panel pictures the brilliancy of a missal illumination, and which reflect the purity and the clearness of his tranquil life and his reverential soul. ”

“ The first great painting in the Academy—to return from this digression—is the famous Madonna of Cimabue. This picture is astonishing. Although considered by many critics to manifest lingering traces of the Byzantine bandages, it seems to us, on the contrary, to be wonderfully free from stiffness and conventionality. The genius of Cimabue extricates itself at a bound from the trammels of preceding systems, and flies vigorously towards nature.
The Madonna is colossal. She wears a hood, and holds her child in her arms. There is a strong human, yet spiritualized expression upon the face. ”

“ Miss Sally.
There were three other youths there, besides George; all stout for the Continental side of the question, and full of eager but restrained zeal; ready to take up arms at a moment's notice; equally ready to wait for the ripened time. Of such men were those armies made up that endured with a woman's patience and fought with a man's fury, righting a great wrong as much by moral as by physical strength, and going to death for the right, when death, pitiless and inevitable, stared them in the face. ”

“ Olivia became known in the abodes of sorrow, and a deep power seemed given her to console the suffering and distressed. A deeper power of love sprung up within her; and love, though born of sorrow, ever brings peace with it. Many were the hearts that reposed on her; many the wandering that she reclaimed, the wavering that she upheld, the desolate that she comforted. As a soul in heaven may look back on earth, and smile at its past sorrows, so, even here, it may rise to a sphere where it may look down on the storm that once threatened to overwhelm it. ”

“ We begin low with coarse masks, and rise to the most subtle and beautiful. The red men told Columbus, "they had an herb which took away fatigue"; but he found the illusion of "arriving from the east at the Indies" more composing to his lofty spirit than any tobacco. Is not our faith in the impenetrability of matter more sedative than narcotics? You play with jackstraws, balls, bowls, horse and gun, estates and politics; but there are finer games before you. Is not time a pretty toy? Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals. ”

“ It has no remarkable merit as a work of art, but it is the portrait of Keats, painted in Rome by his friend Severn. The young poet is resting his head on his hand, as if it were heavy and tired. His face has a look of illness; his eyes are large, and the spaces around them are hollow. His wide and well-formed brow, and all the features, betray a temperament delicate, passionate, and sensitive to excess. This portrait was painted, according to tradition, in the little summer-house studio, at the corner of the Via Strozzi. ”

“ Its working-out in the every-day part is brilliant and pungent; and much ingenuity is shown in connecting the tragic and mysterious element in Jericho's life with the ordinary, vain, worldly existence of his wife and daughters. It is startling to find ourselves in the regions of the impossible, just as we are beginning to know the persons of the fable. But the mind reassures itself. This Jericho, with his mysterious fate,—is not he, in this twilight of fiction, shadowing to us the real destiny of real money-grubbers whom we may see any day about our doors? ”

“ But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hung it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune, and talked of "the dear cottage where so many joyful hours had flown." Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the country. Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion. Being fascinated, they fascinate others. ”

“ I am afraid you do not study logic at your school, my dear. It does not follow that I wish to be pickled in brine because I like a saltwater plunge at Nahant. I say that conceit is just as natural a thing to human minds as a centre is to a circle. But little-minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes' conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even if it have the third vowel as its centre, it does not soon betray it. ”

“ One may almost hear the roar of the continual fires, the throb of the engines, the heavy beat of the trip-hammers, and the rattle of the spindles, by which the work of the world is done; and their noises, blended by the distance into one monotonous sound, seem like the voice of the restless, hard-working, unsettled spirit of gain. Manchester is built and is worked for profit, not for pleasure; beauty is driven away from her as a thing at variance with practical life ”

“ Now the outer world comes to thee through the mourning veil!
But after the funeral comes life again,—hard, cold, inexorable life, knocking with business-like sound at the mourner's door, obtruding its common-place pertinacity on the dull ear of sorrow. The world cannot wait for us; the world knows no leisure for tears; it moves onward, and drags along with its motion the weary and heavy-laden who would fain rest.
Olivia would have buried herself in her sorrows. There are those who refuse to be comforted. The condolence of friends seems only a mockery ”

“ What a satire, by the way, is that machine on the mere mathematician! A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; that turns out formulæ like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand bushels of them!
I have an immense respect for a man of talents plus "the mathematics." But the calculating power alone should seem to be the least human of qualities, and to have the smallest amount of reason in it; since a machine can be made to do the work of three or four calculators, and better than any one of them. ”

“ Take the sorrows of others to your heart; they shall widen and deepen it. Ours is a religion of sorrow. The Captain of our salvation was made perfect through suffering; our Father is the God of all consolation; our Teacher is named the Comforter; and all other mysteries are swallowed up in the mystery of the Divine sorrow. 'In all our afflictions He is afflicted.' God refuseth not to suffer;—shall we?"
There is no grave so desolate that flowers will not at last spring on it. Time passed with Albert and Olivia with healing in its wings. ”

“ Perhaps you will see heaven through that veil."
It is appalling to think how near to the happiest and most prosperous scene of life stands the saddest despair. All homes are haunted with awful possibilities, for whose realization no array of threatening agents is required,—no lightning, or tempest, or battle; a peaceful household lamp, a gust of perfumed evening air, a false step in a moment of gayety, a draught taken by mistake, a match overlooked or mislaid, a moment's oversight in handling a deadly weapon,—and the whole scene of life is irretrievably changed! ”

“ Father Payson was the minister of the village, and their nearest neighbor; and not only their nearest neighbor, but their nearest friend. In the afternoon of his years, life's day with him now stood at that hour when, though the shadows fall eastward, yet the colors are warmer, and the songs of the birds sweeter, than even in its jubilant morning.
God sometimes gives to good men a guileless and holy second childhood, in which the soul becomes childlike, not childish, and the faculties in full fruit and ripeness are mellow without sign of decay. ”

“ When the "Central America" sinks to the bottom of the sea with five hundred souls on board, though it is in the midst of a terrible tempest, the public instinct is inclined to impute the disaster less to the mysterious uproar of wind and wave than to some concealed defect in the vessel. Had she sunk in a tranquil ocean, while the winds were idle and the waves asleep, the incident would have produced a burst of indignation, above the deeper wail of sorrow, strong enough to sweep the guilty instruments of it out of existence. ”

“ Now-a-days it is happily expected of every man who writes of another to recognize his humanity,—not to treat him as a machine for the production of this or that—scientific, or literary, or other—material. Homo sum is the motto of the biographer, and so of the humbler biographic sketcher. Jerrold is just one of those who require and reward this kind of personal sympathy and attention;—so radiant was the man of all that he put into his books!—so quick, so warm, so full of light and life, wit and impulse! ”

“ But the Hindoos, in their sacred writings, express the liveliest feeling, both of the essential identity, and of that illusion which they conceive variety to be. "The notions, 'I am,' and 'This is mine,' which influence mankind, are but delusions of the mother of the world. Dispel, O Lord of all creatures! the conceit of knowledge which proceeds from ignorance." And the beatitude of man they hold to lie in being freed from fascination.
The intellect is stimulated by the statement of truth in a trope, and the will by clothing the laws of life in illusions. ”

“ But the nice distinctions which Englishmen and Americans can make in the cause and course of this famous state trial, because they live in the very atmosphere of party politics, are utterly unknown to the men of continental Europe; and until the end of time, England will be condemned out of the mouths of her most brilliant sons, whenever her foes—and she is too great not to have many and bitter foes—shall discuss the history of her Indian empire.
Every nation condemns conquest, and every nation with power to enter upon a career of conquest rushes eagerly upon it. ”

“ In the rear, a little way off, is a row of ugly sheds, yawning towards the street, where, on Sundays, the farmers who come from a distance tie their beasts, each in his separate stall. In hot days, in the summer time, when all the doors and windows of the meeting-house are set wide open, the hollow sound of horses' stamping mingles with the preacher's drowsy tones, and sometimes the congregation is startled from repose by the shrill squeal of some unlucky brute, complaining of the torture inflicted by the sharp teeth of its ill-natured mate or vicious neighbor ”

“ My mission is now fully revealed to me; everything is reform, reform. I have been led here step by step. Your magnetism is very soothing. The old crumbling walls of creeds and conventionalities are to be swept away, and their foundations subjected to the plough and the harrow. I am in the harness. I have no motive for concealment; I tell you frankly where I stand," said Pendlam. Another long sigh from Susan. ”

“ The world rolls, the din of life is never hushed. In London, in Paris, in Boston, in San Francisco, the carnival, the masquerade is at its height. Nobody drops his domino. The unities, the fictions of the piece it would be an impertinence to break. The chapter of fascinations is very long. Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its unmaskers. ”