Various

“ True, but it is only the instinct of the imagination that discovers where the blind side lies. The tops of kettles had been dancing ever since kettles were first hung over fires, but no one caught the blind side of the fact till a Scotch boy saw it as he sat dreaming at his aunt's fireside.
But if Bacon's imagination was imperfect in some directions, it possessed in others a vision of the largest scope. No man ever saw more clearly or vindicated more nobly the dignity of knowledge, the capacity of the human mind, and the glory of God in the works of His hand. ”

“ In spite of all our bemoaning, the physical structure of man displays its due power and beauty when we consent to give it a fair chance. On the cheek of every healthy child that plays in the street, though clouded by all the dirt that ever incrusted a young O'Brien or M'Cafferty, there is a glory of color such as no artist ever painted. I can take you to-morrow into a circus or a gymnasium, and show you limbs and attitudes which are worth more study than the Apollo or the Antinous, because they are life, not marble. ”

“ And I think, Minnie," added Fred, laughing, "I have the added grace of humility; for I am far from making a merit of my sort of life."
"No,—it would be difficult to make a merit of it," said Minnie.
That was clear enough. Fred loved to have her for an auditor. So long as she could not see over him, he was as good as infinite to her.
"In the first place, Minnie, you must allow, it is a duty to surround ourselves with the beautiful in all things. It conduces to the highest self-culture; and self-culture is our first duty." ”

“ It was dirty, but it was Rome; and to any one who has long lived in Rome even its very dirt has a charm which the neatness of no other place ever had. All depends, of course, on what we call dirt. No one would defend the condition of some of the streets or some of the habits of the people. But the soil and stain which many call dirt I call color, and the cleanliness of Amsterdam would ruin Rome for the artist. Thrift and exceeding cleanness are sadly at war with the picturesque. To whatever the hand of man builds the hand of Time adds a grace, and nothing is so prosaic as the rawly new. ”

“ I was tired and hungry, and, while the diligence was being unloaded, I entered a caffé close by, and called for some buttered toast. My hair (I had plenty at that time) stood on end at the answer I received. There was no buttered toast to be had, the waiter said. "It was not the custom." I confess I augured ill of a city from whose caffés, unlike all others throughout Italy, such a staple of breakfast was banished.
I am fond of buttered toast, I own. If it is a weakness, I candidly plead guilty. My mother—bless her soul!—brought me up in the faith of buttered toast. ”

“ What! is not genius before rules? Why should I imitate Titian's tints, when I can copy my own fancies? When I get my ideal perfected, you will soon see it real. I can copy it in half an hour. If it is in me, it will come out of me, like Curran's eloquence."
"But," says Minnie, doubtfully, looking at the easel where the golden curls and heavenly eyes of an angel are obscured by the russet-brown of a beginning wood-nymph, "why don't you keep to one idea, Fred?"
"Oh, because I choose to be fancy-free. I will not have my imagination trammelled. Let it wander at its own sweet will. ”

“ Its glory is, that, breaking through the formulae of creeds and the external signs of religious faith, it has the courage to listen to the voice of God all along the devious course of human history,—hearing that mysterious tone, not alone in the chants of the Hebrews or the confessions of the Christians, but in every smallest utterance of truth, every syllable of unselfish patriotism, every groan of offended conscience, every myth springing from the moral sense, every song, every speech which would exalt the True, the Beautiful, and the Good over the selfish and false and base. ”

“ Sandford came to the top of the stairs and listened with apparent apathy, while the maddened woman poured out her rage. He stood a moment like one in a dream, and then slowly came down.
"There is your cane," said Marcia, fiercely, pointing to the umbrella-stand.
"I give you fair warning," said Greenleaf, calmly, "that you will never strike more than one blow. No man shall assault me but at the risk of his life."
"What is the need of this fury?" asked Mr. Sandford. "I don't want to quarrel with a pauper. You are well rid of him. ”

“ As they stand before the pictures of the Madonna, their hats placed on the ground before them, and their thick, black, dishevelled hair covering their sunburnt brows, blowing away on their instruments or pausing to sing their novena, they form a picture which every artist desires to paint. Their dress is common to nearly all the peasantry of the Abruzzi, and, worn and tattered as it often is, it has a richness and harmony of tint which no new clothes could ever have, and for which the costumes of the shops and regular models offer a poor substitute. ”

“ There are invalids who are objects of sympathy indeed, guiltless heirs of ancestral disease, or victims of parental folly or sin,—those whose lives are early blighted by maladies that seem as causeless as they are cureless,—or those with whom the world has dealt so cruelly that all their delicate nature is like sweet bells jangled,—or those whose powers of life are all exhausted by unnoticed labors and unseen cares,—or those prematurely old with duties and dangers, heroes of thought and action, whose very names evoke the passion and the pride of a hundred thousand hearts. ”

“ No one lives long in Rome without loving it; and I must, in the beginning, confess myself to be in the same category. Those who shall read these slender papers, without agreeing to the kindly opinions often expressed, must account for it by remembering that "Love lends a precious seeing to the eye." My aim is far from ambitious. I shall not be erudite, but I hope I shall not be dull. These little sketches may remind some of happy days spent under the Roman sky, and, by directing the attention of others to what they have overlooked, may open a door to a new pleasure. ”

“ In the long run, there has rarely been a revolution which has not worked beneficially for the mass of mankind; but the earliest effects of every revolution are to them bad, and eminently so. It is to this fact that we must look for an explanation of the slowness with which the masses move against any existing order of things, even when they are well aware that it treats them with singular injustice. For nothing can be better established than that no revolution was ever the work of the body of the people,—of the majority. ”

“ The same idea in the soul of an Englishman who struggled up to it and still holds it antagonistically, and in the soul of an American to whom it is congenital and spontaneous, and often unrecognized, except as an element blended with all his thoughts, a natural movement, like the drawing of his breath or the beating of his heart, is a very different thing. You may teach a quadruped to walk on his hind legs, but he is always wanting to be on all-fours. Nothing that can be taught a growing youth is like the atmospheric knowledge he breathes from his infancy upwards. ”

“ We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club, subjugating man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of it, and the second by our handling of it,—we rehearse it, I say, by our own hearth-stones, with the cold poker as our club, and the exercise is easy. But when we come to real life, the poker is in the fire, and, ten to one, if we would grasp it, we find it too hot to hold;—lucky for us, if it is not white-hot, and we do not have to leave the skin of our hands sticking to it when we fling it down or drop it with a loud or silent cry! ”

“ Care refuses to sit behind the horseman, despite the Latin sentence; you leave it among your garments when you plunge into the river, it rolls away from the rolling cricket-ball, the first whirl in the gymnasium disposes of it, and you are left free, as boys and birds are free. If athletic amusements did nothing for the body, they would still be medicine for the soul. Nay, it is Plato who says that exercise will almost cure a guilty conscience,—and can we be indifferent to this, my fellow-sinner? ”

“ When the last ties that bound her to her native village were broken, she accepted the hearty invitation of her cousin, Walter Monroe, and went with him to Boston. The house at once became a home to her. Mrs. Monroe received her as though she had been a daughter. Such a pretty, motherless child,—so loving, so sincere! How could the kind woman repress the impulse to fold her to her bosom? Not even her anxiety to retain undivided possession of her son's heart restrained her. So Alice lived, quiet, affectionate, but undemonstrative, as was natural after the trials she had passed. ”

“ But it is very certain that all the physical universe takes the side of health and activity, wooing us forth into Nature, imploring us hourly, and in unsuspected ways, to receive her blessed breath into body and soul, and share in her eternal youth. ”

“ A heart which has been domesticated by matrimony and maternity is as tranquil as a tame bulfinch; but a wild heart which has never been fairly broken in flutters fiercely long after you think time has tamed it down,—like that purple finch I had the other day, which could not be approached without such palpitations and frantic flings against the bars of his cage, that I had to send him back and get a little orthodox canary which had learned to be quiet and never mind the wires or his keeper's handling. ”

“ You are generous and good. I love and honor you as my cousin, my friend, my protector. Do not think of a nearer relationship."
Walter stood irresolute.
"Some other time, dear Alice," he faltered out. "I don't wish to pain you, and I have no courage to-day."
"Let me be frank, Cousin Walter. Under other circumstances, I would not anticipate the words I saw trembling on your lips. But even if the memory of my poor father were not so fresh, I could not hear you." She hid her face as she went on. "I have received a wound from the faithlessness of one lover which never will heal. ”

“ There may be, I thought, among the thousands of travellers that annually winter at Rome, some to whom the common out-door pictures of modern Roman life would have a charm as special as the galleries and antiquities, and to whom a sketch of many things, which wise and serious travellers have passed by as unworthy their notice, might be interesting. Every ruin has had its score of immortelles hung upon it. The soil has been almost overworked by antiquarians and scholars, to whom the modern flower was nothing, but the antique brick a prize. ”

“ I played my part in the chorus of fault-finders, and cried out as loud as anybody. The upshot was what might have been expected. Independence went to the dogs—for a while. Liberty, thank God, remained in this little corner, at least,—liberty, the great lever for those who use it wisely. I know of nations, far more experienced than we are in political matters, and whose programme in 1848 was far less complicated than ours, who cannot say as much for themselves.
The times were unpropitious to the buttered-toast question, and it had quite slipped out of my mind. ”

“ Besides, she looks at me, Sir, stares at me, as if she wanted to get an image of me for some gallery in her brain,—and we don't love to be looked at in this way, we that have—I hate her,—I hate her,—her eyes kill me,—it is like being stabbed with icicles to be looked at so,—the sooner she goes home, the better. I don't want a woman to weigh me in a balance; there are men enough for that sort of work. ”

“ It gladdens one's heart to watch them, as they walk arm in arm of an evening, singing in chorus, or fill the pits of the cheaper theatres, or sit down at fashionable caffés in their jackets, with a self-confidence and freedom of manner pleasant to behold. The play of free institutions is not counteracted here, thank God, by the despotism of conventionalities. No shadow of frigid respectability hangs over people's actions and freezes spontaneousness. ”

“ There isn't a thing that was ever said or done in Boston, from pitching the tea overboard to the last ecclesiastical lie it tore into tatters and flung into the dock, that wasn't thought very indelicate by some fool or tyrant or bigot, and all the entrails of commercial and spiritual conservatism are twisted into colics as often as this revolutionary brain of ours has a fit of thinking come over it.—No, Sir,—show me any other place that is, or was since the megalosaurus has died out, where wealth and social influence are so fairly divided between the stationary and the progressive classes! ”

“ I have been worried to know whether this was owing to some innate depravity of disposition on my part, some malignant torturing instinct, which, under different circumstances, might have made a Fijian anthropophagus of me, or to some law of thought for which I was not answerable. It is, I am convinced, a kind of physical fact like endosmosis, with which some of you are acquainted. A thin film of politeness separates the unspoken and unspeakable current of thought from the stream of conversation. After a time one begins to soak through and mingle with the other. ”

“ There was something shockingly ludicrous in charging the hero and victor of the Days of June with designs against property; but the charge may have led Cavaignac to have doubts whether he had not himself been a little too ready to believe the charge of Agrarianism when preferred against a large number of the people of France, whom he had treated with grape-shot by way of teaching them respect for the rights of property. There is nothing like bringing injustice home to a man to open his eyes to its evil nature. ”

“ Sometimes it is a Nymph, sometimes a Naiad, sometimes Undine. Once, he dashed all the green of the wood-nymph's forest, with one stroke, into green water, intending to put in Undine, with a boat. He has not fulfilled his intention; but he works on, with the luxurious abandonment of genius to its spell, be it what it may. He does not care what it ends in. One of Fred's theories is, that the imagination, by constant and intense exercise, may so project the image it conceives, as to make it the subject of ocular contemplation and imitation. ”

“ The pifferari are by no means the only street-musicians in Rome, though they take the city by storm at Christmas. Every day under my window comes a band of four or five, who play airs and concerted pieces from the operas,—and a precious work they make of it sometimes! Not only do the instruments go very badly together, but the parts they play are not arranged for them. A violone grunts out a low accompaniment to a vinegar-sharp violin which saws out the air, while a trumpet blares in at intervals to endeavor to unite the two, and a flute does what it can, but not what it would. ”

“ To study, with the artist, the least of her beauties,—to explore, with the man of science, the smallest of her wonders,—or even simply to wander among her exhaustless resources, like a child, needing no interest unborrowed from the eye,—this feeds body and brain and heart and soul together. ”

“ Now let me just talk common-sense, Doctor,—which has its time and place, just as much as theology;—and if you have the most theology, I flatter myself I have the most common-sense; a business-man must have it. Now just look at your situation,—how you stand. You've got a most important work to do. In order to do it, you must keep your pulpit, you must keep our church together. We are few and weak. We are a minority. Now there's not an influential man in your society that don't either hold slaves or engage in the trade ”

“ The last great Agrarian contest which the Romans had was that which takes its name from the Gracchi, and which began at the commencement of the fourth generation before the birth of Christ. On the part of the reformers, it was as strictly legal a movement as ever was known. Not a single acre of private land was threatened by them; and whoever pays attention to the details of their measures cannot fail to be struck with the great concessions they were ready to make to their opponents,—the men who had literally stolen the public property, and who pretended to hold it as of right. ”