Various

“ We have seen him take up his pen and begin a tragedy; or, to drop the fancy, we have made it real to ourselves in what manner Shakspeare's writing evidences that he wrought as an artist,—one who has an idea in his mind of an effect he desires to produce, and elaborates it with careful skill, not in a trance or ecstasy, but "in clear dream and solemn vision." The subtile tone of feeling to be struck is as much a matter of art as the action or argument to be opened. ”

“ Feeling is deeper than thought; and as the earthquake lifts the mountain with all the weight of its rocky strata and of the piled-up edifices that crown its top, so there comes a time when the emotional nature rises up and overthrows the carefully wrought structures of the intellect, and asserts its original and supreme mastery over the soul of man.
Alice felt sure that every trace of her love for Greenleaf had disappeared. She looked in her heart and saw there only the memory of neglect and unfaithfulness. If love existed, it was as fire lurks in ashes, unrecognized. ”

“ When we are writing, how difficult it is to avoid pleasing our own vanity! how hard not to step aside a little, now and then, for a brilliant thought or a poetic fancy, or any of the thousand illusions that throng upon us! Even for the sake of a well-sounding phrase we are often tempted to turn. The language of passion,—how hard it is to feign, to write it! how harder than all, to keep the tone, serious, or whatever it may be, with which we begin, so that no expressions occur to break it,—lapses of thought or speech, that are like sudden stumbles or uneasy jolts! ”

“ It is not well to decide by impulse,—to be swayed by a thrill. When my heart tells me to give you my hand, it shall be yours. I don't wish to be charmed out of my calmer judgment. Your presence, your fiery words, and your will, are sufficiently magnetic."
"My dear Alice, I have been guilty of one folly, a serious one, but you don't believe I am incapable of constancy henceforth. Remember you were away; time hung heavily on my hands; my good nature made me accept invitations which brought me into daily contact with a woman who of all others was most dangerous to a man of ardent temperament. ”

“ The photograph has completed the triumph, by making a sheet of paper reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture.
This triumph of human ingenuity is the most audacious, remote, improbable, incredible,—the one that would seem least likely to be regained, if all traces of it were lost, of all the discoveries man has made. It has become such an everyday matter with us, that we forget its miraculous nature, as we forget that of the sun itself, to which we owe the creations of our new art. ”

“ But fashion and wealth are two very solemn realities, which the frivolous class of moralists have talked a great deal of silly stuff about. Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms and social intercourse. What business has a man who knows nothing about the beautiful, and cannot pronounce the word view, to talk about fashion to a set of people who, if one of the quality left a card at their doors, would contrive to keep it on the very top of their heap of the names of their two-story acquaintances, till it was as yellow as the Codex Vaticanus? ”

“ So it is with Shakspeare, both in the conception and development of his characters, and in the play of his reflections and fancies. All the world recognizes his sanity, and the health and beauty of his genius.
Not all the world, either. Nature's poet fares no better than Nature herself. Half the world is out of the pale of knowledge; a good part of the rest are stunted by cant in its Protean shapes, or by inherited narrowness and prejudice, and innumerable soul-cankers. They neither know nor think of Nature or Poetry. ”

“ For he not only feels, but sees his feeling; he takes it up as an object and holds it before him,—a feeling to be conveyed. Just as a sculptor holds in his mind a form and models it out of clay, undiverted by other forms thronging into his vision, or by the accidental forms that the plastic substance takes upon itself in the course of his work, till it stands forth the image of his ideal,—so the poet works out his states of poetic feeling. ”

“ You persist in fixing your attention upon one dark spot. Do you remember this miniature? It has never been out of my bosom, and there has never been but one day in which I might not loyally carry it there. At that time, when I opened it, your eyes looked out at me with a tender reproach, and I was instantly recalled to myself. It was only the illusion of a moment, through which I had passed. Whatever may happen, I have one consolation: this dear image will remind me of the love I once possessed. I shall fold to my bosom the Alice that once was mine, and strive to forget our estrangement. ”

“ When human art says to each one of us, I will give you ears that can hear a whisper in New Orleans, and legs that can walk six hundred miles in a day, and if, in consequence of any defect of rail or carriage, you should be so injured that your own very insignificant walking members must be taken off, I can make the surgeon's visit a pleasant dream for you, on awaking from which you will ask when he is coming to do that which he has done already,—what is the use of poetical or rhetorical amplification? ”

“ The time is perhaps at hand when a flash of light, as sudden and brief as that of the lightning which shows a whirling wheel standing stock still, shall preserve the very instant of the shock of contact of the mighty armies that are even now gathering. The lightning from heaven does actually photograph natural objects on the bodies of those it has just blasted,—so we are told by many witnesses. The lightning of clashing sabres and bayonets may be forced to stereotype itself in a stillness as complete as that of the tumbling tide of Niagara as we see it self-pictured. ”

“ Surely, Madam,—if you mean by flattery telling people boldly to their faces that they are this or that, which they are not. But a woman who does not carry a halo of good feeling and desire to make everybody contented about with her wherever she goes,—an atmosphere of grace, mercy, and peace, of at least six feet radius, which wraps every human being upon whom she voluntarily bestows her presence, and so flatters him with the comfortable thought that she is rather glad he is alive than otherwise, isn't worth the trouble of talking to, as a woman ”

“ Intellect is to a woman's nature what her watch-spring skirt is to her dress; it ought to underlie her silks and embroideries, but not to show itself too staringly on the outside.—You don't know, perhaps, but I will tell you;—the brain is the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart the reddest. Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace. ”

“ In the lovely glass stereograph of the Lake of Brienz, on the left-hand side, a vaguely hinted female figure stands by the margin of the fair water; on the other side of the picture she is not seen. This is life; we seem to see her come and go. All the longings, passions, experiences, possibilities of womanhood animate that gliding shadow which has flitted through our consciousness, nameless, dateless, featureless, yet more profoundly real than the sharpest of portraits traced by a human hand. ”

“ Nothing, even in music, ever showed an art growing out of a nicer sensibility in sound than his variety and appropriateness in style. For an art it is, and we cannot make a definition of that word which shall include other forms of art and not include it. If the passion and the feeling make the style, it is the poet's art that leaves them free to do it; he superintends; he feigns that which he leaves to make; he shares his art with "great creating Nature." All is unreal ”

“ It is one of the saddest truths of this sad mystery of life, that woman is, often, never so much an angel as just the moment before she falls into an unsounded depth of perdition. And what shall we say of the man who leads her on as an experiment,—who amuses himself with taking woman after woman up these dazzling, delusive heights, knowing, as he certainly must, where they lead?
We have been told, in extenuation of the course of Aaron Burr, that he was not a man of gross passions or of coarse indulgence, but, in the most consummate and refined sense, a man of gallantry. ”

“ It is not possible to conceive Shakspeare reviewing his lines and thinking to himself, "That is well done; my genius has not deserted me; I could not have written anything more to my liking, if I had set about it deliberately!" But it is easy to see him running it over with a sensation of "This will serve; my poet will open their eyes and ears; and now for the hall and banquet scene."
The sense of fitness and relation operates among thoughts and feelings as well as among fancies, and its results cannot be mistaken for accident. ”

“ And this is where Shakspeare's art is so noble,—in that he conquers the entire universe of thought, sentiment, feeling, and passion,—goes into the whole and takes up and portrays characters the most extreme and diverse, passions the most wild, sentiment the most refined, feelings the most delicate,—and does this by an art in which he must make his characters appear real and we looking on, though he cannot use, to develop his dramas, a hundred-thousandth part of the words that would be used in real life,—that is, in Nature. ”

“ Just as the exquisite sea-anemones and all the graceful ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the surface, the elegances and suavities of life die out one by one as we sink through the social scale. Fortunately, the virtues are more tenacious of life, and last pretty well until we get down to the mud of absolute pauperism, where they do not flourish greatly.
—I had almost forgotten about our boarders. As the Model of all the Virtues is about to leave us, I find myself wondering what is the reason we are not all very sorry. Surely we all like good persons. She is a good person. ”

“ In truth, he would have been glad to see the young poet united to one of his own daughters. But his imperial word was pledged,—and as Mien-yaun willed it, so it was.
XII. Their home is a little cottage on the bank of the Peiho; finery never enters it, and neatness never leaves it. The singing of birds, the rustling of the breeze, the murmuring of the waters are the only sounds that they hear. Their windows will shut, and their door open,—but to wise men only; the wicked shun it. Truth dwells in their hearts, innocence guides their actions. ”

“ In a certain sense, it is not an extravagance to say that all who are now living and speak English have views of life and Nature modified by the influence of Shakspeare. We see the world through his eyes; he has taught us how to think; the freedom of soul, the strong sense, the grasp of thought,—above all, the honor, the faith, the love,—who has imparted such noble ideas of these things as he? ”

“ The busy world, which has no time to remember many, forgets him and remembers only the slain and defeated Hampden. The brilliant renown of the Prince was like the glass toys which record his ingenuity and preserve his name; the hammer and the anvil can scarcely mar them, yet a slight pressure of the finger, in the fatal spot, will burst them into glittering showers of dust. The full force of those iron times beat ineffectual upon Rupert;—Death touched him, and that shining fame sparkled and was shattered forever. ”

“ It is not impossible that scales from the epidermis of the trembling hand of Ann Hathaway's young suitor, Will Shakspeare, are still adherent about the old latch and door, and that they contribute to the stains we see in our picture.
Among the accidents of life, as delineated in the stereograph, there is one that rarely fails in any extended view which shows us the details of streets and buildings. There may be neither man nor beast nor vehicle to be seen. You may be looking down on a place in such a way that none of the ordinary marks of its being actually inhabited show themselves. ”

“ The changes of habits and customs, and the succession of writers who in their turn essay to hold the mirror up to Nature, must always produce such a result. But while the mind of man is capable of enjoying the most fortunate combinations of genius and fancy, the most faithful expositions of the springs of action, the most ludicrous and the most pathetic representations of human conduct, the writings of Fielding and Smollett will be read and their memories kept green. ”

“ Out of the perverse and totally depraved negative,—where it might almost seem as if some magic and diabolic power had wrenched all things from their proprieties, where the light of the eye was darkness, and the deepest blackness was gilded with the brightest glare,—is to come the true end of all this series of operations, a copy of Nature in all her sweet gradations and harmonies and contrasts. ”

“ Dowdyism is clearly an expression of imperfect vitality. The highest fashion is intensely alive,—not alive necessarily to the truest and best things, but with its blood tingling, as it were, in all its extremities and to the farthest point of its surface, so that the feather in its bonnet is as fresh as the crest of a fighting-cock, and the rosette on its slipper as clean-cut and pimpant (pronounce it English fashion,—it is a good word) as a dahlia. As a general rule, that society where flattery is acted is much more agreeable than that where it is spoken. ”

“ The quality of Shakspeare's writing renders it impossible to suppose that it was produced in any other state than one where all the perceptions that make good sense, and not only good, but most excellent sense, were present and alert. Howsoever "apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes" his brain may be, it never gambols from the superintendence of his reason and understanding. In truth, it is the perfectness of the control, the conscious assurance of soundness in himself, which leaves him so free that the control is to so many eyes invisible ”