Various

“ Not that I mean to say that it works smoothly and well at all times,—this Grindwell machine. How can such an old patched and crumbling apparatus be expected always to work well? And how can you hope to find, even in the most enslaved or routine-ridden community, entire obedience to the will of the monarch and his satellites? Unfortunately for the cause of order and quiet, there will always be found certain tough lumps, in the shape of rebellious or non-conformist men, which refuse to be melted in the strong solvents or ground up in the swift mills of Absolutism. ”

“ Now I tell you a poem must be kept and used, like a meerschaum, or a violin. A poem is just as porous as the meerschaum;—the more porous it is, the better. I mean to say that a genuine poem is capable of absorbing an indefinite amount of the essence of our own humanity,—its tenderness, its heroism, its regrets, its aspirations, so as to be gradually stained through with a divine secondary color derived from ourselves. So you see it must take time to bring the sentiment of a poem into harmony with our nature, by staining ourselves through every thought and image our being can penetrate. ”

“ Every such poem has a soul and a body, and it is the body of it, or the copy, that men read and publishers pay for. The soul of it is born in an instant in the poet's soul. It comes to him a thought, tangled in the meshes of a few sweet words,—words that have loved each other from the cradle of the language, but have never been wedded until now. Whether it will ever fully embody itself in a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or not is uncertain; but it exists potentially from the instant that the poet turns pale with it. ”

“ Go out under pretence of shooting on the marshes or botanizing in the forests; study entomology, that most fascinating, most neglected of all the branches of natural history; go to paint a red maple-leaf in autumn, or watch a pickerel-line in winter; meet Nature on the cricket ground or at the regatta; swim with her, ride with her, run with her, and she gladly takes you back once more within the horizon of her magic, and your heart of manhood is born again into more than the fresh happiness of the boy. ”

“ In America I know that many persons may consider the Grindwell Governing Machine a humbug,—an obsolete, absurd, and tyrannous institution, wholly unfitted to the nineteenth century. A machine that proposes to think and act for the whole people, and which is rigidly opposed to the people's thinking and acting for themselves, is likely to find little favor among us. With us the doctrine is, that each one should think for himself,—be an individual mind and will, and not the spoke of a wheel. ”

“ But it must grow up on our own soil; exotics never flourish long under strange skies. We think that many things point to this country as the place where music will achieve new triumphs. We are not bound by old traditions, we have few prejudices to unlearn, and we are able to see merit in more than one school. The same audience that becomes almost intoxicated with the excitement of the Italian opera will listen with the fullest, serenest pleasure to the majestic symphonies of Beethoven or to the sublime choruses of Handel. ”

“ Ben drew me carefully down the garden-path. I inhaled the breath of the tulips and hyacinths, as we passed them. I longed to stay there in that fairy land, for they brought back all the unspeakably rapturous feelings of my boyhood. Strange that such delight, after we become men, never visits us except in moments brief as lightning-flashes,—and then generally only as a memory,—not, as when we were children, in the form of a hope! When we are boys, and sudden joy stirs our hearts, we say, "Oh, how grand life will be!" When we are men, and are thus moved, it is, "Ah, how bright life was!" ”

“ Little Mungloo, who was cunning as a Thug, acted with surprising talent; in fact, some of the Sahibs thought he rather overdid his part, for he dropped his hubble-bubble almost awkwardly, and even kicked,—which the real Nawab had too much self-respect to do,—so that he sent one of his slippers flying one way, and the other another. But he choked, and gasped, and showed the whites of his eyes, and turned black in the face, and shivered through all his frame, so very naturally, that his admiring companions clapped their hands vehemently, and cried, Wah, wah! with all their little lungs. ”

“ In pace is the inscription which the imagination reads over the entrance to the Christian Catacombs.
Full as the upper city is of great and precious memories, it possesses none greater and more precious than those which belong to the city under ground. Republican Rome had no braver heroes than Christian Rome. The ground and motives of action were changed, but the courage and devotion of earlier times did not surpass the courage and devotion of later days,—while a new spirit displayed itself in new and unexampled deeds, and a new and brighter glory shone from them over the world. ”

“ We cling still to the belief, that the Persian curriculum of studies—to ride, to shoot, and to speak the truth—is the better part of a boy's education. As the urchin is undoubtedly physically safer for having learned to turn a somerset and fire a gun, perilous though these feats appear to mothers,—so his soul is made healthier, larger, freer, stronger, by hours and days of manly exercise and copious draughts of open air, at whatever risk of idle habits and bad companions. ”

“ But, spite of all, the Evil Eye overtook Chinna Tumbe, when the pleasant peddler came all the way from Cabool, with his bushy-tailed kitten, and his mungooz cracking nuts.
They do say the ghost of Chinna Tumbe walks,—that always at midnight, when the Indian nightingale fills the Baboo's banian topes with her lugubrious song, and the weird ulus hoot from the peepul tops, a child, girt with silver bells, and followed by a Persian kitten and a mungooz, shakes the Baboo's gate, blows upon a silver whistle, and cries, so piteously, "Ayah! Ayah!" ”

“ This we must consider the most important musical event of the season; for great singers, though surely not common among our English race, have not been unknown; the ability to interpret God gives freely,—the power to create, rarely. In any generation, probably not ten men arise who write new melodies; of these, only a small proportion have either the intellectual power or the aesthetic feeling to combine the subtile elements of music into forms of lasting beauty. Most of them are influenced by prevailing mannerisms, and their music is therefore ephemeral, like the taste to which it ministers. ”

“ Wisely said Horace Mann, "All through the life of a pure-minded but feeble-bodied man, his path is lined with memory's gravestones, which mark the spots where noble enterprises perished, for lack of physical vigor to embody them in deeds." And yet more eloquently it has been said by a younger American thinker, (D.A. Wasson,) "Intellect in a weak body is like gold in a spent swimmer's pocket,—the richer he would be, under other circumstances, by so much the greater his danger now." ”

“ She is easily excited to every good emotion, and also to the nobler failings of anger, indignation, and pride. But she is so far above any meanness or littleness, that she don't know them when she sees them. They pass with her for what they are not, and she is spared the humiliation of knowing what her species is capable of. Kate's nature is very charming, but there is a gentler, calmer order of beings in the sex. ”

“ When the history of philanthropy shall be written, and the just meed of commendation bestowed on the benefactors of humanity, how much more exalted a place will he receive, in the memory and gratitude of the world, than the perjured and audacious despot who, born the same year, in the neighboring city of the Hague, has won his way to the throne of France by deeds of selfishness and cruelty! ”

“ In countries where all the social and political action is concentrated around the throne, where a pretty woman may decide the policy of a reign, a royal marriage plunge nations into war, and the disgrace of a favorite cause the downfall of a party, such persons find an ample field for the exercise of the arts upon which they depend for success. The history and romance of Modern Europe are full of them; they crowd the pages of Macaulay and Scott. But the full sunlight of our republican life leaves no lurking-place for the mere trickster. ”

“ One of the qualities most frequently attributed to Burr is fortitude; upon this characteristic his biographer frequently dwells. And indeed, when one reads of the misfortunes which came upon him,—the disappointments which he encountered,—his poverty abroad,—his terrible afflictions, and dreary old age,—and how gallantly he bore up under all,—unblenching, unmurmuring, struggling cheerfully and patiently to the end,—one cannot repress a feeling of admiration for the courage which endured so much misery, and of pity for the faults which brought that misery upon him. ”

“ The cubes will not roll at all; they have a great talent for standing still, and always keep right side up. But very soon the young philosopher finds that things which roll so easily are very apt to roll into the wrong corner, and to get out of his way when he most wants them, while he always knows where to find the others, which stay where they are left. Thus he learns—thus we learn—to drop the streaked and speckled globes of falsehood and to hold fast the white angular blocks of truth. ”

“ The sudden and tragic death of Alexander Hamilton produced a universal feeling of sympathy and sorrow. As the leader of the bar, the advocate of the Constitution, the statesman who had given the law to American commerce, the most accomplished soldier in the army, and connected with the still recent glories of the Revolution,—his name had become familiar to every ear, and was associated with every subject of popular interest. ”

“ We suppose our readers will agree with us in looking with eager delight to the promise of a national school of music. Every nation must create its own song. The passionate music of Italy electrifies our cooler blood, but it does not adequately express all our feelings nor in any way represent our character. We also find many of the compositions of Germany so purely intellectual that they do not touch us until we have learned to like them. If we ever have a school of music, it will be in harmony with our rapidly developing characteristics. ”

“ The enthusiasms, the visions, the loud preaching and praying, the dull iteration and reiteration of inspired truth till all the inspiration is driven out, were all probably to be heard and witnessed in the early Christian days at Rome. Not all the converts were saints,—and none of them were such saints as the Catholic painters of the last three centuries have prostituted Art and debased Religion in producing. The real St. Cecilia stood in the beauty of holiness before the disciples at Rome far purer and lovelier than Raphael has painted her. ”

“ Every American voter or votress is allowed to keep his or her little intellectual wind-mill, coffee-mill, pepper-mill, loom, steam-engine, hand-organ, or whatever moral manufacturing or grinding apparatus he or she likes. Each one may be his own Church or his own State, and yet be none the less a good and useful citizen, and the union of the States be in none the more danger. But it is not so in Grindwell. The rules of the Grindwell machine allow no one to do his own grinding, unless his mill-wheel is turned by the central governing power. ”

“ Kane was formed, manifested, and matured. The character itself—so gentle and so persistent, so full at once of self-reliance and reliance on Providence, so tender in affection and so indomitable in fortitude—is now one of the moral possessions of the country, worth more to it than any new invention which increases its industrial productiveness or any new province which adds to its territorial dominion. ”

“ But, unhappily, the stories of the early Christian centuries were taken possession of by a Church which has sought in them the means of enhancing her claims and increasing her power; mingling with them falsehoods and absurdities, cherishing the wildest and most unnatural traditions, inventing fictitious miracles, dogmatizing on false assertions, until reasonable and thoughtful religious men have turned away from the history of the first Christians in Rome with a sensation of disgust, and with despair at the apparently inextricable confusion of fact and fable concerning them. ”

“ On each side are small chocolate-colored heathens, in a sort of short chemises, silver-bangled as to their wrists and ankles, and already with the caste-mark on the foreheads of some of them,—shy, demure younglings, just learning all the awful significance of the word Sahib, who have been brought from mysterious homes by fond ayahs, and smuggled in through back-stairs influence, or boldly introduced by the durwan under the glorifying patronage of that terrible Hastings Clive. ”

“ We will only say, in passing, that it is pleasant to see the rapid spread of clubs for the latter game, which a few years since was practised only by a few transplanted Englishmen and Scotchmen; and it is pleasant also to observe the twin growth of our indigenous American game of base-ball, whose briskness and unceasing activity are perhaps more congenial, after all, to our national character, than the comparative deliberation of cricket. Football, bating its roughness, is the most glorious of all games to those whose animal life is sufficiently vigorous to enjoy it. ”

“ Everything is reduced to such perfect system in its operations, that the necessity for individual opinion is almost superseded, and even private consciences are laid upon the shelf,—just as people lay by an antiquated timepiece that no winding-up or shaking can persuade into marking the hours,—for have they not the clock on the Government railroad station opposite, which they can at any time consult by stepping to the window? For instance, individual honesty is set aside and replaced by a system of rewards and punishments. Honesty is an old-fashioned coat. ”

“ He cannot by any figure of speech be called a statesman. As a politician, he was one of the first to discover and one of the most skilful in the use of those unworthy arts which have brought the pursuit of politics into disrepute; but we doubt whether he could have succeeded upon the broader field of the present day. Perfectly competent to manage a single city, he would have failed in an attempt to govern a party. His talents were well defined by Jefferson, who spoke of him as a great man in little things, and a small man in great things. ”

“ I begin to think that one sex will never be thoroughly comprehended by the other, notwithstanding the desperate efforts the novelists are making now-a-days. They all go upon the same plan. They take some favorite woman, watch her habits keenly, dissect her, analyze her very blood and marrow,—then patch her up again, and set her in motion by galvanism. She stalks through three volumes and—drops dead. I have seen Kate laugh herself almost into convulsions over the knowing remarks upon the sex in Thackeray, Reade, and others. ”