Various

“ Ridiculous as it may appear to you, I'm in a perpetual state of nervous flutter. I can't, for the life of me, help fearing that we shall be found out. I fancy that every man who looks twice at me in the street is a spy"——
At those words, I thought my legs would have given way under me. Nothing but strength of mind kept me at my Peep-Hole,—nothing else, I give you my word of honor.
"Stuff and nonsense!" cries Mr. Jay, with all the effrontery of a veteran in crime. "We have kept the secret up to this time, and we will manage cleverly to the end. ”

“ Cecilia, the glorious Virgin Martyr and the Saint of Music, as connected with the catacombs, is, indeed, one of the most curious to be found in the annals of the Church. Legend and fact are strangely mingled in it, and over it hangs a perplexing mist of doubt, but not so dense as wholly to conceal all certainty. It is a story of suffering, of piety, of enthusiasm, of superstition, and of science;—it connects itself in many points with the progress of corruption in the Church, and it has been a favorite subject for Art in all ages. ”

“ Kate and I rode in a carriage. Ben followed in a wagon, with the trunks and "jaunting-car-r-r." When we reached the ferry, the porters carried my couch, and Ben myself, depositing us upon the deck, where I could look upon the river. The stately flow of the waters impressed me with dread. They swept by, not swift, not slow,—steady, like fate. Ours may be a dull river to an artist; but its volume of water, its width, perhaps even the flat shores, which do not seem to bound it, make it grand and impressive. ”

“ THE PURE PEARL OF DIVER'S BAY. When the great storms raged along the Atlantic coast, they sometimes tossed a token into Diver's Bay. In more than one of the rude cabins composing the fishermen's settlement memorials of shipwreck and disaster might be found; and these memorials did not always fail to kindle imagination, and to arouse soft feelings of pity for the calamities they suggested.
One morning, that dawned bright and mild after a week of tempest, Clarice Briton went out with her coarse basket to gather the sea-weed tossed on the shore. ”

“ Are we basely content with our pecuniary good-fortune? Do we look on the tall column of figures on the credit side of our national ledger as a sufficing monument of our glory as a people? Are we of the North better off as provinces of the Slave-holding States than as colonies of Great Britain? Are we content with our share in the administration of national affairs, because we are to have the ministry to Austria, and because the newspapers promise that James Gordon Bennett shall be sent out of the country to fill it? ”

“ We believe there is virtue enough left in the North and West to infuse health into our body politic; we believe that America will reassume that moral influence among the nations which she has allowed to fall into abeyance; and that our eagle, whose morning-flight the world watched with hope and expectation, shall no longer troop with unclean buzzards, but rouse himself and seek his eyrie to brood new eaglets that in time shall share with him the lordship of these Western heavens, and shall learn of him to shake the thunder from their invincible wings. ”

“ If Clarice Briton was the finest girl, Luke Merlyn, beyond question, was the most promising fellow in this little village of fishermen. He was strong, active, ready for any undertaking that required a bold spirit and firm hand,—was quicker in thought and readier in speech than any lad about. He had a little personal vanity,—and good looks to encourage the same; but he had besides a generous heart, and the conviction was general, whether expressed or not, that in Luke a man was growing up who would some day take the lead among the fishermen of Diver's Bay. ”

“ In the name of Democracy,—of that sacred and sublime principle into which we, as a nation, have been baptized,—which declares the inalienable rights of man,—and which, as it makes the tour of the earth, hand and hand with Christianity, is lifting the many from the dust, where for ages they have been trampled, into political life and dignity,—he converts a paltry swindle into its standard and creed, and prostitutes its glorious mission, as a redeeming influence among men, into a ministry of slavery and outrage. ”

“ We have spent our strength in quarrelling about the character of men, when we should have been watchful only of the character of measures. A scruple of conscience has no right to outweigh a pound of duty, though it ought to make a ton of private interest kick the beam. The great aim of the Republican party should be to gain one victory for the Free States. One victory will make us a unit, and is equal to a reinforcement of fifty thousand men. The genius of success in politics or war is to know Opportunity at first sight. There is no mistress so easily tired as Fortune. ”

“ I pray to be spared the sight of any object which, by rousing within me the desire of present possession, may renew the struggle with despair, to which I nearly succumbed when my profession was wrenched from me.
I was at first surprised to find that my sister cherished a more exceeding tenderness for her young friend than I had ever seen her manifest for any one; but my astonishment ceased when I found out that Alice's half-brother, who bears a different name, is the gentleman I saw with Kate in the box-tree arbor. ”

“ A great many people in this world have but one form of rhetoric for their profoundest experiences,—namely, to waste away and die. When a man can read, his paroxysm of feeling is passing. When he can read, his thought has slackened its hold.—You talk about reading Shakspeare, using him as an expression for the highest intellect, and you wonder that any common person should be so presumptuous as to suppose his thought can rise above the text which lies before him. But think a moment. A child's reading of Shakspeare is one thing, and Coleridge's or Schlegel's reading of him is another. ”

“ An air of sterility, of incompetence to their proper aims, belongs to many who have both experience and wisdom. But a large utterance, a river, that makes its own shores, quick perception and corresponding expression, a constitution to which every morrow is a new day, which is equal to the needs of life, at once tender and bold, with great arteries,—this generosity of ebb and flow satisfies, and we should be willing to die when our time comes, having had our swing and gratification. ”

“ What is pent and smouldered in the dumb actor is not pent in the poet, but passes over into new form, at once relief and creation.
The other merit of Hafiz is his intellectual liberty, which is a certificate of profound thought. We accept the religions and politics into which we fall; and it is only a few delicate spirits who are sufficient to see that the whole web of convention is the imbecility of those whom it entangles,—that the mind suffers no religion and no empire but its own. ”

“ Under such influences, and with the excitement produced by the marvellous success of the French armies, it is not singular that young men looked eagerly forward to a participation in the prodigies and splendors of their time,—that they should turn disdainfully from the paths of honest industry, and that everything which constitutes the true wealth and greatness of a state should have been despised or forgotten in the lurid and blood-stained glare of military glory, which cowered like an incubus on the breast of Europe. ”

“ Perhaps, also, in the unsophisticated pride with which he contemplated the promptitude and decision of his action, in saving an innocent people from a sanguinary ruffian, and in maintaining the honor of his country unsullied, dim visions crossed his mind of a letter of thanks from the President, and of the vote of a sword by Congress. Alas for such hopes! Commodore Paulding was clearly not a politician; he did not know that black meant white and white meant black,—nor that the present of a filibuster, which he sent to the President, was the present of something worse than an elephant. ”

“ Married life is the school in which the most accomplished artists in this department are found. A delicate woman is the best instrument; she has such a magnificent compass of sensibilities! From the deep inward moan which follows pressure on the great nerves of right, to the sharp cry as the filaments of taste are struck with a crashing sweep, is a range which no other instrument possesses. ”

“ Within her church are the remains of the bath-chamber where she suffered death. The mosaics of the apse and the arch of triumph tell of the first finding of her body; Maderno's statue recalls the fact of its second discovery long after; and now this newly opened, long forgotten chapel shows where her precious body was first laid away in peace, brings the legend of her faithful death into clearer remembrance, and concludes the ancient story with dramatic and perfect completeness.
"The Lord discovereth deep things out of darkness, and bringeth out to light the shadow of death." ”

“ Yet more portentous is it to see a great people consenting that fraud should be made national by the voice of a Congress in which the casting vote may be bought by a tide-waitership, and then invested with the solemnity of law by a Court whose members are selected, not for uprightness of character or breadth of mind, but by the inverse test of their capacity for cringing in subservience to party, and for narrowing a judgment already slender as the line of personal interest, till it becomes so threadlike as to bend at the touch, nay, at the breath, of sectional rapacity. ”

“ Ah, Mary! I forget continually that for me there is no such joy in the future.
"Hope springs eternal in the human breast,"
and no reasoning can quell it. I subdue my fancy to my fate sometimes, as a rational creature ought surely to do; but then I suffer acutely, and am wretched; while in a careless abandonment of myself to any and every dream of coming joy I find present contentment. I cannot help myself. I shall continue to dream, I am sure, until I have grown so old that I can resign all earthly hopes without sighing. ”

“ Our sense of private honor and integrity must be quickened; our consciousness of responsibility to God and man for the success of this experiment in practical Democracy, in order to which the destiny of a hemisphere has been entrusted to us, must be roused and exalted; we must learn to feel that the safety of universal suffrage lies in the sensitiveness of the individual voter to every abuse of delegated authority, every treachery to representative duty, as a stain upon his own personal integrity ”

“ In the years when Dame Briton, by nature proud and ambitious, was putting forth the most successful efforts she ever made at decent housekeeping, endeavoring to transform her husband into such a person as he was not born to be, striving hard to work her will,—in those years Clarice was born.
Is the pearl a product of disease?
Clarice grew up in the midst of influences not the purest or most elevating. She was not by nature gay, but silent, truthful, and industrious. She was no coward by nature, and her training made her brave and hardy. ”

“ Nearly all the women and children of the Bay were down on the beach at nightfall, watching for the coming of husband, son, and brother; and before dark all had arrived except Merlyn and his Luke.
The wind was blowing with terrific violence, and darkness fell on the deep like despair. But until the windows of heaven were opened, and the floods poured down, Clarice Briton and her father, and the wife and children of Merlyn, stood on the beach, or climbed the rocks, and waited and tried to watch. ”

“ Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated,—a great compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen as any two mammals of the same species are like each other. Each audience laughs, and each cries, in just the same places of your lecture; that is, if you make one laugh or cry, you make all. Even those little indescribable movements which a lecturer takes cognizance of, just as a driver notices his horse's cocking his ears, are sure to come in exactly the same place of your lecture, always. ”

“ What we need is a thorough awakening of the individual conscience; and if we once become aware how the still and stealthy ashes of political apathy and moral insensibility are slipping under our feet and hurrying us with them toward the crater's irrevocable core, it may be that the effort of self-preservation called forth by the danger will make us love the daring energy and the dependence on our individual strength, that alone can keep us free and worthy to be freemen. ”

“ What I wanted to say about books is this: that there are times in which every active mind feels itself above any and all human books.
——I think a man must have a good opinion of himself, Sir,—said the divinity-student,—who should feel himself above Shakspeare at any time.
My young friend,—I replied,—the man who is never conscious of any state of feeling or of intellectual effort entirely beyond expression by any form of words whatsoever is a mere creature of language. I can hardly believe there are any such men. Why, think for a moment of the power of music. ”

“ The advantage of our opponents has been that they have always had some sharp practical measure, some definite and immediate object, to oppose to our voluminous propositions of abstract right. Again and again the whirlwind of oratorical enthusiasm has roused and heaped up the threatening masses of the Free States, and again and again we have seen them collapse like a water-spout, into a crumbling heap of disintegrated bubbles, before the compact bullet of political audacity. ”