Various

“ But now, in times of peace, the fair flower of her womanhood was forming. Like a white hyacinth she grew,—a lady to look upon, with whom, for loveliness, not a lady of the fort could be compared. Not one of them in courage or unselfishness exceeded her.
The family lived in a little house adjoining the barracks. It was a home that could boast of nothing beyond comfort and cleanliness;—the word comfort I use as the poor man understands it. Neither Adolphus nor Pauline had any worldly goods to bring with them when they came to Foray. ”

“ If you have the consciousness of genius, do something to show it. The world is pretty quick, nowadays, to catch the flavor of true originality; if you write anything remarkable, the magazines and newspapers will find you out, as the school-boys find out where the ripe apples and pears are. Produce anything really good, and an intelligent editor will jump at it. Don't flatter yourself that any article of yours is rejected because you are unknown to fame. Nothing pleases an editor more than to get anything worth having from a new hand. ”

“ The persons who might reasonably have been expected to take that neglected bit of ground under their loving care did no such thing. The beds were weeded by Sandy, the gardener, and now and then a blossom rewarded that attention; but the flower-patch waited for Elizabeth.
The gardener knew very well how she prized the pretty flowers;—they appealed to his own rude nature in a very tender way. He loved to see the young girl flying down the narrow paths as swiftly as a bird, if she but spied a bloom from afar. ”

“ The air of England seems favorable to richness and abundance of blood; there the life-vessels sit deep, and bring opulent cargoes to the flesh-shores; and the rotund figure, the ruddy solid cheek, and the leisurely complacent movement, all show how well supported and stored with vital resources the Englishman is. But to the American's lip the great foster-mother has proffered a more pungent and rousing draught,—not an old Saxon sleeping-cup for the night, but a waking-cup for the bright morning and busy day. ”

“ There was no longer any tie to bind Carl to his native village. All his kin, as well as Katrine's, were in the grave. He was not bred a miller, and did not feel competent to manage the mill. Besides, his mind had received new ideas while he was in the army. He had heard of countries where men were equal before the laws, where the peasant owed no allegiance but to society. The germ of liberty had been planted in his breast, and he could no longer live contented with the rank in which he had been born. ”

“ Would it be so dreadful for you to live here, when we could always have music and the garden? And these woods seem pleasant, when you get acquainted. Day or night I can't get him out of my mind. It is just as if you were shut up that way, papa. I am afraid to be happy when any one is so wretched."
The result was, that Elizabeth's words, and not so much her words as the state of things she contrived to make apparent by them, brought Adolphus Montier to a clear, resistless sense of the prisoner's fate. ”

“ Well, if there is not much romance about her love, perhaps there is more reality; yet Thornton Lee is just the man one could make an ideal of, if one only would. But this is not what I especially dislike her for; people must love according to their own nature and temperament, and not after another's pattern. The thing that frets me most just now is the way that Eleanor has of divining my thoughts before they are spoken, and even before they are quite clear to myself. ”

“ It is one of the worst signs of our time that a false good-nature or imperfect taste should lead respectable papers to give currency to books destitute of all merit, by the application to them of stereotyped phrases of commendation. These letters, without a grace of style, without a flash of wit, without a genial ray of humor, deformed by coarse breeding, vulgar self-conceit, and ignorant assumption, are bepraised as if they were fresh from the mint of genius, and bore the image and superscription of Madame de Sévigné or Lady Mary Wortley! ”

“ No man assumes that attitude until he is already a party to the deepest truth, is the silent side of a seer; and in a nation where any numbers are passing this more than Pythagorean lustrum, a speech is surely coming that will no more need to apologize for itself than the speech of the forest or the ocean-shore. The region of the trade-winds is skirted with calm. Sydney Smith said of Macaulay, that his talk, to render it charming, "needed only a few brilliant flashes of silence." We are talkative, but the flashes of silence are not wanting, and there is prophecy in them as well as charm. ”

“ Thus here do these highways of God's own making run, as it were, past every man's door, and connect each man with the world he lives in.
Rivers await their due celebration. We easily see that Nile, Ganges, Euphrates, Jordan, Tiber, Thames, are rivers of influence in human history, no less than water-currents on the earth's surface. They have borne barks and barges that the eye never saw. They have brought on their soft bosoms freight to the cities of the brain, as well as to Memphis, Rome, London. Some experience of their spiritual influence must have fallen to the lot of most men. ”

“ In the evening this order is reversed; and after the comedy is concluded, Nature lulls us to meditation and repose by the mellow notes of the little Vesper-bird, and the pensive and still more melodious strains of the solitary Thrushes.
In pleasant, sunshiny weather, the Bobolink seldom flies without singing, often hovering on the wing over the place where his mate is sitting upon her ground-built nest, and pouring forth his notes with great loudness and fluency. ”

“ Deep conversation with any river readily interprets to us that venerable mythus which connects Eden with the four rivers of the world; as if water must flow where man is chiefly blest.
But the point here to be emphasized is, that rivers are the progressive and public element in its geographical expression. They throw the continent open; they are doors and windows, through which the nations look forth upon the world, and leave and enter their own household. They are the hospitality of the continent,—every river-mouth chanting out over the sea a perpetual, "Walk in," to all the world. ”

“ There is always a dearth of really fine articles for a first-rate journal; for, of a hundred pieces received, ninety are at or below the sea-level; some have water enough, but no head; some head enough, but no water; only two or three are from full reservoirs, high up that hill which is so hard to climb.
You may have genius. The contrary is of course probable, but it is not demonstrated. If you have, the world wants you more than you want it. It not only a desire, but a passion, for every spark of genius that shows itself among us ”

“ The Bobolink, or Conquedle, has unquestionably great talents as a musician. In the grand concert of Nature it is he who performs the recitative parts, which he delivers with the utmost fluency and rapidity; and one must be a careful listener, not to lose many of his words. He is plainly the merriest of all the feathered creation, almost continually in motion, and singing upon the wing, apparently in the greatest ecstasy of joy.
There is not a plaintive strain in his whole performance. Every sound is as merry as the laugh of a young child ”

“ A soul whose wealth we have once recognized must be ever rich to us. Gold turns not to copper by keeping; and perhaps old friends are rather like old wine, and can never be too old. Yet who does not mark in the calendar those days wherein he has met a new rich soul, that has a physiognomy, a grace and expression, peculiarly its own? Even decided repulsions have also a use. We whet our conscience on our neighbors' faults, as sober Spartans were made by the spectacle of drunken Helots;—though he who makes habitual talk about his neighbors' faults whets his conscience across the edge. ”

“ Central North-America is to an extraordinary degree worked out everywhere in careful detail, in moderate hill and valley, in undulating prairie and fertile plain,—not tossed into barren mountain-masses and table-lands, like that vast desert plateau which stretches through Central Asia,—not struck out in blank, like the Russian steppes and the South American llanos, as if Nature had wanted leisure to elaborate and finish. ”

“ You never heard anybody say where they thought the purse and slipper were hid,—did you?"
"Come, Rosy," cried Mark, "come down to the meadow; there is nothing more to be got out of the old well. Let us leave Brad alone with his book and his fish."
The children turned away towards the meadow,—Rosamond meditating upon the probability of her ever finding the purse and slipper, if she should ever set out in quest of them, and Mark thinking what a fool such a big fellow as Bradford must be, to mind any woman that ever was born. ”

“ There comes a time when the souls of human beings, women, perhaps, more even than men, begin to faint for the atmosphere of the affections they were made to breathe. Then it is that Society places its transparent bell-glass over the young woman who is to be the subject of one of its fatal experiments. The element by which only the heart lives is sucked out of her crystalline prison. Watch her through its transparent walls;—her bosom is heaving ”

“ God forgive us, if we ever speak harshly to young creatures on the strength of these ugly truths, and so, sooner or later, smite some tender-souled poet or poetess on the lips who might have sung the world into sweet trances, had we not silenced the matin-song in its first low breathings! Just as my heart yearns over the unloved, just so it sorrows for the ungifted who are doomed to the pangs of an undeceived self-estimate. I have always tried to be gentle with the most hopeless cases. ”

“ This is the direct outburst of a new life, arising and wrestling with the old forms, habitudes, institutions, with whatsoever is imported and traditional, on the one hand, and with the crude or barbarous improvisations of native energy, on the other. It is a force springing out of the summit of the brain, the angel of its noblest sentiment, going forth with no less an aim than to construct a whole new social status from ideas. ”

“ The primitive English element was pirate; let the primitive American be bore. The fathers of the Britain that is took men by the throat; let the fathers of the America that is to be take them by the—button;—that is amelioration enough for one thousand years! In truth, this intense personal interest which characterizes the American, though often awkwardly manifested and troublesome, is an admirable feature in his constitution, and few traits should awaken our pride or expectation more. ”

“ I often look at her with wonder, her nature is so different from mine,—never impulsive, always cool and steady,—full of ceaseless activity, yet never hurried, and seemingly never perplexed. I sometimes think she sees the whole of her life mapped out before her, and takes up every event in order. With the exception of the servants, we are the only occupants of the house, Eleanor does not seek nor desire the society of her neighbors; and so while she works I dream, read, or answer Madge or Bertha's letters. ”

“ Accordingly, in our American Man must be found, first, social largeness and susceptibility,—whatsoever, in the breadth of a flexile and sympathetic nature, may contribute to the keeping of the Golden Rule. But the broadest good-feeling will not alone suffice. The great pledge of peace, fellowship, and profitable co-working among such a population as we anticipate must be sought in the deeper unity of moral principle. For Right is one, and is every man's interest. Right is better than Charity; for Right meets, or even anticipates, normal wants, while Charity only mends failures. ”

“ Satan resolves at once to seduce and destroy him. But Faustus's good angel has mercy on him. He buries him in a deep sleep, and creates in his place a phantom, with which the cheated devils try successfully the whole process of temptation and seduction. All this appears to Faustus in a dream. He awakes; the Devil discovers his error, and flies with shame and fury, and Faustus, thanking Providence for its warning, clings to truth and virtue more firmly than ever. ”

“ If they will only note the difference between long and short, the eel of Ocean's bottom may feel on his slippery skin the smooth messages of our Presidents, and the catfish, in his darkness, look fearless on the secrets of a Queen. Any beast, bird, fish, or insect, which can discriminate between long and short, may use the telegraphic alphabet, if he have sense enough. Any creature, which can hear, smell, taste, feel, or see, may take note of its signals, if he can understand them. ”

“ Nowhere, at least in modern times, have thought and action approached so nearly and intimately as in America; nowhere is speculative intellect so colored with the hues of practical interest without limiting its own flight; nowhere are labor and executive power so receptive of pure intellectual suggestion. The union of what is deepest and most recondite in thought with clear-sighted sagacity has been well hit by Lowell in his description of the typical American scholar,—
"Sits in a mystery calm and intense,
And looks round about him with sharp common-sense." ”

“ There are thousands who admire the Mocking-bird, because, after pouring forth a continued stream of ridiculous and disagreeable sounds, or a series of two or three notes repeated more than a hundred times in uninterrupted and monotonous succession, he condescends to utter a single delightfully modulated strain. He often brings his tiresome extravaganzas to a magnificent climax of melody, and just as often concludes an inimitable chant with a most contemptible bathos. ”