Various

“ The steam-driven wheel leaves us no occasion to envy even that ubiquitous denizen of the universe, the flying-fish. We have in it the most economical means of self-transportation, as well as of mechanical production. It only remains to make the most of it. This, to be sure, will not be achieved without infinite labor and innumerable failures. The mechanical genius of the race is like the polypus anxiously stretching its tentacles in every direction, and though frustrated thousands of times, it grasps something at last. ”

“ National characters become, as it were, household gods through the sculptor's portrait; the duplicates of Canova's head of Napoleon seem as appropriate in the salons and shops of France, as the heads of Washington and Franklin in America, or the antique images of Scipio Africanus and Ceres in Sicily, and Wellington and Byron in London.
There is no phase of modern life so legitimate in its enjoyment and so pleasing to contemplate as the life of the true artist. Endowed with a faculty and inspired by a love for creative beauty, work is to him at once a high vocation and a generous instinct. ”

“ Andam arya! "Hail, exalted Lord!" he cries; and the exalted lord, extending the pure lilies of his hands lordliwise, as one who condescends to accept an humble offering, mutters the mysterious benediction which only Gooroos and high Brahmins may bestow,—Asirvadam!
The low-caste slave who may be admitted to the distinguished presence of our friend, to implore indulgence, or to supplicate pardon for an offence, must thrice touch the ground, or the honored feet, with both his hands, which immediately he lays upon his forehead ”

“ When the sluggish intellect is roused, the slow speech quickened, the cold nature warmed, the latent sympathy developed, the flagging spirit kindled,—before the trains of thought become confused, or the will perverted, or the muscles relaxed,—just at the moment when the whole human zoöphyte flowers out like a full-blown rose, and is ripe for the subscription-paper or the contribution box,—it would be hard to say that a man was at that very time, worse, or less to be loved, than when driving a hard bargain with all his meaner wits about him. ”

“ Abrogate the golden rule, if you will, and establish the creed of caste,—let the strongest of human races have full license to enslave the weakest, and let it have the pick of soil and staples,— still, if you do not abolish the ground rules of arithmetic, and the fact that a pound of carbon costs less than a pound of corn, and must cost less for at least a thousand years to come, chattelism of man will cease in another generation, and the next century will not dawn on a human slave. ”

“ Substance is homogeneous; but substances, or beings, are infinite. Spinoza looked upon the universe and saw in it the undivided background on which the objects of human consciousness are painted as momentary pictures. Leibnitz looked and saw that background, like the background of one of Raphael's Madonnas, instinct with individual life, and swarming with intelligences which look out from every point of space. Leibnitz's universe is composed of Monads, that is, units, individual substances, or entities, having neither extension, parts, nor figure, and, of course, indivisible. ”

“ How absorbed he is!—standing erect by the mass of clay,—with graduated touch, moulding into delicate undulations or expressive lines the inert mass,—now stepping back to see the effect,—now bending forward, almost lovingly, to add a master indentation or detach a thin layer,—and so, hour after hour, working on, every muscle in action, each perception active, oblivious of time, happy in the gradual approximation, under patient and thoughtful manipulation, of what was a dense heap of earth, to a form of vital expression or beauty. ”

“ To this variety in unity, this wealth of antique genius, Crawford brought the keen relish of an observant and the aptitude of a creative mind. His taste in Art was eminently catholic; he loved the fables and the personages of Greece because of this very diversity of character,—the freedom to delineate human instincts and passions under a mythological guise,—just as Keats prized the same themes as giving broad range to his fanciful muse. ”

“ As Raja, the warrior, sprang from the right arm of Brahma, and Vaishya, the cultivator, from his belly, and Soodra, the laborer, from his feet,—so Asirvadam the Brahmin was conceived in the head and brought forth from the mouth of the Creator; and he is above the others by so much as the head is above arms, belly, and feet; he is wiser than the others, inasmuch as he has lain among the thoughts of the god, has played with his inventions, and made excursions through the universe with his speech. ”

“ For the like reasons, I hold a Californian or European correspondence to be an impossibility. As for him whose want of politeness fixes a gulf, a week broad, between himself and his correspondent, there is no excuse. As one reads a letter, an answer to whatever worth answering may be in it leaps to the lips; to give it utterance that moment is the only natural, courteous, and truthful course. Ten days hence, the reply, which now comes of its own accord, cannot be found; what might have been a source of pleasure to two persons will have become a piece of thankless drudgery. ”

“ If we call to mind even a few of the sculptured creations which are "a joy forever," even to retrospection,—haunting by their pure individuality the temple of memory, permanently enshrined in heartfelt admiration as illustrations of what is noble in man and woman, significant in history, powerful in expression, or irresistible in grace,—we feel what a world of varied interest is hinted by the very name of Sculpture. Through it the most just and clear idea of Grecian culture is revealed to the many. ”

“ It shall not preach the possibility of inventing perpetual motion or a machine with a soul in it, as was lately and vainly attempted in our good city of Lynn,—where, however, it may be said, they do succeed in making soles to what resemble machines. It is not for us to be either so enthusiastic, impious, or uncharitable as to prophesy that human ingenuity will ever endow its creations with anything more than the rudest semblance of that self-directing vitality which characterizes the most servile of God-created machinery. ”

“ We suspect that Shakspeare will long continue the only specimen of the genus. His contemporaries, in their comedies, either force what they call "a humor" till it becomes fantastical, or hunt for jokes, like rat-catchers, in the sewers of human nature and of language. In their tragedies they become heavy without grandeur, like Jonson, or mistake the stilts for the cothurnus, as Chapman and Webster too often do. Every new edition of an Elizabethan dramatist is but the putting of another witness into the box to prove the inaccessibility of Shakspeare's stand-point as poet and artist. ”

“ Those painful scenes in the slave-prison made her reflect that sympathy with the actual miseries of life was better than weeping over romances. She was rising above the deleterious influences of her early education, and beginning to feel the dignity of usefulness. She said to her husband, "I shall not be sorry, if we are always poor. It is so pleasant to help you, who have done so much for me! And Alfred, dear, I want to give some of my earnings to Aunt Debby. The poor old soul is trying to lay up money to pay that friend of yours who bought her son and sent him to Canada. ”

“ He became a conspicuous figure, he became a commanding power, not only in the intellectual world, of which he constituted himself the centre, but in part also of the civil. It lay in the nature of his genius to prove all things, and it lay in his temperament to seek rapport with all sorts of men. He was infinitely related;—not an individual of note in his day but was linked with him by some common interest or some polemic grapple; not a savant or statesman with whom Leibnitz did not spin, on one pretence or another, a thread of communication. ”

“ I don't think they are the first to see one's defects, but they are the first to catch the color and fragrance of a true poem. Fit the same intellect to a man and it is a bow-string,—to a woman and it is a harp-string. She is vibratile and resonant all over, so she stirs with slighter musical tremblings of the air about her.— Ah, me!—said my friend, the Poet, to me, the other day,—what color would it not have given to my thoughts, and what thrice-washed whiteness to my words, had I been fed on women's praises! ”

“ With some, method is a law, and taste severe in affairs, costume, exercise, social intercourse, and faith. The simplicity, directness, uniformity, and pure emphasis or grace of Sculpture have analogies in literature and character: the terse despatch of a brave soldier, the concentrated dialogue of Alfieri, some proverbs, aphorisms, and poetic lines, that have become household words, puritanic consistency, silent fortitude, are but so many vigorous outlines, and impress us by virtue of the same colorless intensity as a masterpiece of the statuary. ”

“ The water-lily is the type of the poet's soul,— he told me.
——What do you think, Sir,—said the divinity-student,—opens the souls of poets most fully?
Why, there must be the internal force and the external stimulus. Neither is enough by itself. A rose will not flower in the dark, and a fern will not flower anywhere.
What do I think is the true sunshine that opens the poet's corolla?— I don't like to say. They spoil a good many, I am afraid; or at least they shine on a good many that never come to anything. ”

“ Peradventure, the prayers of holy men had prevailed, and the heavens which had been as brass were melted, and the earth which had been but ashes revived again, a living altar, crowned afresh with flowers, and prophetic of the thank-offerings of harvests. Or it might be that a great discoverer had added a new world to the domain of human happiness, by some invention which should lighten the toils and multiply the innocent satisfactions of mankind. ”

“ As he had drawn beasts and trees and stones to listen to the music of his lyre, so Christ, with persuasive sweetness and compelling force, drew men more savage than beasts, more rooted in the earth than trees, more cold than stones, to listen to and follow him. As Orpheus caused even the kingdom of Death to render back the lost, so Christ drew the souls of men from the very gates of hell, and made the grave restore its dead. And thus from the old heathen story the Christian drew new suggestions and fresh meaning, and beheld in it an unconscious setting-forth of many holy truths. ”