Various

“ In the right society, such a girl as Laura would win homage on every side, and make herself happy by making everybody else so."
"I believe you are right there, Sir," said Mrs. Birch, quite charmed with such beautiful appreciation of what she felt to be Laura's excellence; "and I don't wonder sometimes that she should be discontented with the society she has here, poor girl!"
"When you see the sun begin to shine in the morning, you may be sure enough it will keep rising all the forenoon," said Chip, with the air of a great moral philosopher, conscious of having made a decided impression. ”

“ And soon Colonel Burr, with one on either arm, was to be seen on the top of the hill beyond the house,—the very one from which Mary, the week before, had seen the retreating sail we all wot of. Hence, though her companion contrived, with the adroitness of a practised man of gallantry, to direct his words and looks as constantly to her as if they had been in a tête-a-tête, and although nothing could be more graceful, more delicately flattering, more engaging, still the little heart kept equal poise; for where a true love has once bolted the door, a false one serenades in vain under the window. ”

“ ROCK, TREE, AND MAN. It is an interesting thought, that will occur to a contemplative mind, that the world contained, from the time when it was a nebulous mass, all the materials of the future individuals of the animate and inanimate creation,—that the elaborate creatures of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, as well as every mineral, were floating in amorphous masses through space. Human beings, like genius that was condensed from vapor at the rubbing of Aladdin's lamp, were diffused in gases, waiting the touch of the Great Magician's wand to bring them into form and infuse them with life. ”

“ Bessie cast about her bright, innocent looks of girlish curiosity, which yet shrank from any chance encounter with the furtive glance or cool stare of admiration. Zelma sat motionless and impassive. Her eyes wandered naturally, but coldly, over the audience, seeming to take no cognizance of any face, strange or familiar; but when they were lifted above the crowd, to the old carved ceiling of the hall, or dropped upon the beautiful hands which lay listlessly folded in her lap, the cold, blank look she had set against the world went out of them. ”

“ For Zelma, she grew more humble and simple and less exacting, the more she bestowed from a "bounty boundless as the sea."
It was but a brief while, scarcely the lifetime of a rose,—the fragrant snow of the hawthorn blossoms had not melted from the hedges since they met,—and yet, in that little season, the deepest, divinest mystery of human life had grown clear and familiar to their hearts, and was conned as the simplest lesson of Nature. ”

“ If I have not heard a woman cry and moan, and then again laugh as though she would die laughing, I have heard sounds so like them that—I am a fool to confess it—I have covered my head with the bedclothes; for I have had a fancy in my dreams, that I could hardly shake off when I woke up, about that so-called witch that was his great-grandmother, or whatever it was,—a sort of fancy that she visited the little gentleman,—a young woman in old-fashioned dress, with a red ring round her white neck,—not a necklace, but a dull stain. ”

“ Zara, the Captive Queen, is beyond comparison the strong character of this play. There is a spice and fire even in her wickedness, which make her terribly attractive, and give her a more powerful hold on the sympathies than the decorous and dolorous Almeria, for all her virtuous sorrows and perplexities. Zara's passion is of the true Oriental type, leaping from the extremes of love and hate with the fierceness and rapidity of lightning. ”

“ With but one affection not poisoned by a sense of obligation and condescension, and that a sentiment in which her intellect had little share, a gentle, protective, household love, which quickened no daring fancy, inspired no dream of freedom or power, Zelma's mind was driven in upon itself, and out of the seclusion and triteness of her life fashioned a fairy world of romance and beauty. ”

“ The Doctor was soon wide awake, talking with fervent animation on the topic of disinterested benevolence,—Burr the mean while studying him with the quiet interest of an observer of natural history, who sees a new species developing before him. At all the best possible points he interposed suggestive questions, and set up objections in the quietest manner for the Doctor to knock down, smiling ever the while as a man may who truly and genuinely does not care a sou for truth on any subject not practically connected with his own schemes in life. ”

“ Is there any trick that love and their own fancies do not play them? Just see how they marry! A woman that gets hold of a bit of manhood is like one of those Chinese wood-carvers who work on any odd, fantastic root that comes to hand, and, if it is only bulbous above and bifurcated below, will always contrive to make a man—such as he is—out of it. I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a Gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of. ”

“ As a general rule, it is yet too soon to write the History of the United States since 1784. Half a century has not been sufficient to wear out the bitter feeling excited by the long struggle of Democrats and Federalists. Respectable gentlemen, who, more pious than Aeneas, have undertaken to carry their grandfathers' remains from the ruins of the past into the present era, seem to be possessed with the same demon of discord that agitated the deceased ancestors. The quarrels of the first twenty years of the Constitution have become chronic ink-feuds in certain families. ”

“ Will it not be consoling, standing close by the graves which have been prepared for us, to leave the world some little legacy of wisdom sedulously gleaned from the fields of the fading past,—some intangible, but honest wealth, the not altogether worthless accumulation of an humble, but earnest life,—something which may lighten the load of a sad experience, illuminate the dark hours which as they have come to all must come to all through all the ages, or at least divert without debauching the mind of the idler, the trifler, and the macaroni? ”

“ Reluctantly he withdrew his regard from a face which bespoke a character of singular originality and force, not wanting either in womanly pride or tenderness,—a face in which beauty itself was so subordinate to something higher, more ineffable, that one could scarcely define feature or color through the illuminated and changeful atmosphere of soul which hung about it,—the shadows of great thoughts, the light mists of dreamy and evanescent fancy. ”

“ It was not easy for Chip to love any being but himself,—not even a woman. But his smart figure, for which Nature and the tailors had done their best, set the general female imagination into the most lively action. Many were the dreams about him,—day-dreams and night-dreams,—that were dreamed in front of all manner of little filigree bird nest bonnets and under snowy nightcaps ”

“ CHIP DARTMOUTH. It is wonderful how Nature provides for the taking off and keeping down of her monsters,—creatures that carry things only by force or fraud: your foxes, wolves, and bears; your anacondas, tigers, and lions; and your cunning or ferocious men of prey, of whom they are the types. Storms may and must now and then rage and ravage, volcanoes must have their destructive fits, and the darkness must do its mean and tyrannical things while men are asleep; but calmness and sunshine triumph immeasurably on the whole. ”

“ She opened her book at the play of "Romeo and Juliet," and began to read, not silently, nor yet aloud, but in a low, dreamy tone, in which the sounds of Nature about her, the gurgle of a brook behind the hedge, the sighing of the winds among the pendulous branches of the willow, the silver shiver of the lance-like leaves, the murmurous coming and going of bees, the loving duets of nest-building birds, all seemed to mingle and merge. ”

“ The play was Congreve's tragedy of "The Mourning Bride," one of the best of a class of sentimental and stiltified dramatic productions which the public of our great-grandfathers meekly accepted,—quaffing the frothy small-beer of rant and affectation, in lieu of deep draughts of Nature and passion, the rich, red wine of human life, poured generously forth by the dramatists of a better era. The excesses of fashion then prevailing, hoops, high heels, powder, and patches, were not more essentially absurd and artificial than such representations of high-life and high-tragedy. ”

“ All excitements run to love in women of a certain—let us not say age, but youth. An electrical current passing through a coil of wire makes a magnet of a bar of iron lying within it, but not touching it. So a woman is turned into a love-magnet by a tingling current of life running round her. I should like to see one of them balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch if she did not turn so as to point north and south,—as she would, if the love-currents are like those of the earth our mother. ”

“ Rust, which takes the keen edge from the knife, is only another name for oxydation: keep the knife bright, and no oxygen dares touch it; but the slightest blemish is made a loophole for the entrance of the ever-watchful enemy, who never again leaves it until its destruction is complete.
All the elements have a great love of society; they cannot live alone; they have their likes and their dislikes; they contract alliances which endure for a time, but are dissolved in favor of stronger attractions. ”

“ The air with which Chip took his victory was so exactly like that matter-of-course chuckle with which he would have tossed over the proceeds of a shrewd bargain into his bank-account, that the young lawyer's soul was shocked at it, and he almost wished he had prevented such a shame. However, his discretion came to the rescue, and told him he had done right in not linking his fortunes to a woman who, however beautiful, was too passive in her character to make any man positively happy. ”

“ There had been a time, he felt quite sure, when, if he had pushed a suit, he could have put his name where that of Dartmouth stood in the marriage-settlement, and, as he glanced at Miss Millicent, as she sat in the mellow light of the purplish plate-glass of that superb parlor, she seemed so beautiful and queenly that he almost wished he had done it. Was it quite fit that such a woman should be thrown away upon one of the mere beasts of the stock-market? ”

“ Nay, it must be confessed, that there are some Shakespearean enthusiasts ever dabbling and gabbling about what they call Shakespeariana, who would give more for the pen with which he engrossed a deed or wrote "Hamlet," than for the ability to understand, better than they do or ever can, what he meant by that mysterious tragedy. Biography has its charms and its uses; but it is not by what we know of their bare external facts that
"Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And departing leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time." ”

“ You see, my excellent Robert, that, by some hocus-pocus which I do not exactly comprehend, myself, I have introduced a wheel within a wheel, a letter within a letter, a play within a play, after the manner of the old dramatists; and I beg you to make a note that the foregoing admonitions and most sapient counsels are not addressed to you. You are something of a philosopher; but you are not, like Mr. Stephen Duck, "something of a philosopher and something of a poet"; for I do not believe, O fortunate youth, that you ever invoked the ten ladies minus one in your life ”

“ I always liked that boast of Flaccus about his "monument harder than brass." It is a cheerful sight to see a poor devil of an author in his garret, snapping his fingers at the critics. "No beggar," wrote Pope, "is so poor but he can keep a cur, and no author so beggarly but he can keep a critic." And, after all, abuse is pleasanter than contemptuous and silent neglect. I do honestly believe, that, if it were not for a little too much false modesty, every author, and especially the poets, would boldly and publicly anticipate posthumous fame. ”

“ It was as if the elements were too gross for the constitution of man, when they were first collected from the nebulous mass,—as if they needed to go through the intermediate forms of plants and animals, passing in succession from one to another, before they could be permitted to enter into the bodies of those beings who were to be in God's likeness. But, in very truth, the elements were unaltered by their many transmigrations. It was the divine act of God which caused every plant to spring forth and gave birth to every living thing. ”

“ Not out of Boston parlors, I trust. Why, there isn't a beast or a bird that would drag its tail through the dirt in the way these creatures do their dresses. Because a queen or a duchess wears long robes on great occasions, a maid-of-all-work or a factory-girl thinks she must make herself a nuisance by trailing through the street, picking up and carrying about with her—pah! that's what I call getting vulgarity into your bones and marrow. Making believe be what you are not is the essence of vulgarity. Show over dirt is the one attribute of vulgar people. ”

“ A poet, you know, is a prophet. Console yourself by vaticinating in the bower of your bed-chamber, as you count the feet upon your fingers, your own immortality. If 'tis a delusion, 'tis a cheap one, to which even a poet can afford to treat himself. Play with and humor your life, till you fall asleep, and then the care will be over! ”

“ Year by year and age by age did these humble plants extract their nourishment from the murky vapors that shrouded the earth, and, after fashioning those gases into a living tissue of stems and leaves, year after year did they die and lay their remains upon the rocks, accumulating by slow steps a soil which would in time be capable of giving holding-ground to mightier plants. The trees came,—and gigantic they must have been; and every species of tree, shrub, and herb now upon the earth, and of all animals that walk, fly, or swim, was introduced before the creation of man. ”

“ With a metropolis planted in a crevice between Maryland and Virginia, and stunted because its roots vainly seek healthy nourishment in a soil impoverished by slavery, a paulopost future capital, the centre of nothing, without literature, art, or so much as commerce,—we have no recognized dispenser of national reputations like London or Paris. In a country richer in humor, and among a people keener in the sense of it than any other, we cannot produce a national satire or caricature, because there is no butt visible to all parts of the country at once. ”

“ Of Parsons's college experiences we get less than we could desire; but as he advances in life, we find his mind exercised by the great political and social problem whose solution was to be the experiment of Democracy at housekeeping for herself,—we see him influencing State and even National politics, but always as a man who preferred attaining the end to being known as the means,—and finally, as Chief Justice, reforming the loose habits of the bar, intolerant of gabble, and leaving the permanent impress of his energetic mind and impatient logic on the Common Law of the country. ”

“ My little Mary to-day was in a mood of 'sweet austere composure' quite becoming to her style of beauty; her naive nonchalance at times is rather stimulating. What a contrast between her and la belle Française!—all the difference that there is between a diamond and a flower. I find the little thing has a cultivated mind, enriched by reading, and more by a still, quaint habit of thinking, which is new and charming. ”