Various

“ The eternity of God, the grandeur of Nature, the profundity of the soul, move in silent panorama before you. The great and agitating problems of human existence are depicted with astonishing energy and precision, and marvellous is the conduct of the piece to us who behold it as a painting away back on the dark canvas of antiquity.
We said the Jews had no drama, no theatre, because they would not introduce the Divinity upon the stage. Yet God appears speaking in the Book of Job, not bodily, but ideally, and herein is all difference. This drama addresses the imagination, not the eye. ”

“ However enchanting Havana may prove, when seen through the moonlight of memory, it seems as good a place to go away from as any other, after a stifling night in a net, the wooden shutters left open in the remote hope of air, and admitting the music of a whole opera-troupe of dogs, including bass, tenor, soprano, and chorus. Instead of bouquets, you throw stones, if you are so fortunate as to have them,—if not, boot-jacks, oranges, your only umbrella. ”

“ Came autumn, with its long Indian summer, and winter, with its flinty, sparkling snows, under which all Nature lay a sealed and beautiful corpse. Came once more the spring winds, the lengthening days, the opening flowers, and the ever-renewing miracle of buds and blossoms on the apple-trees around the cottage. A year had passed since the June afternoon when first we showed you Mary standing under the spotty shadows of the tree, with the white dove on her hand—a year in which not many outward changes have been made in the relations of the actors of our story. ”

“ A flood of song wakes us at the earliest daylight; and the shy and solitary Veery, after the Vesper-Bird has concluded his evening hymn, pours his few pensive notes into the very bosom of twilight, and makes the hour sacred by his melody. But after twilight is sped, and the moon rises to shed her meek radiance over the sleeping earth, the Nightingale is not here to greet her rising, and to turn her melancholy beams into the cheerfulness of daylight. ”

“ There is the glow of poetic enthusiasm in his eyes, and the fervor of religious feeling in all his moods; as he tends his flock amid the quietness and beauty of his native hills, he joins to the aspirations of his soul the melodies of music. So the night overtakes him, the labors of the day are past, his meditations withdraw him from the society of men, he is alone with Nature and with God;—at such a moment the spirit of composition and utterance is upon him, and he hymns himself in those lofty and touching stanzas,—
"O Jehovah, our Lord,
How excellent is thy name in all the earth! ”

“ June roses were laid against her dark hair and in her fair hands, when she was carried to the lonely graveyard of Greenfield, where mulleins and asters, golden-rod, blackberry-vines, and stunted yellow-pines adorned the last sleep of the weary wife and mother; for she left behind her a week-old baby,—a girl,—wailing prophetically in the square bedroom where its mother died.
Judge Hyde did not marry again, and he named his baby Mehitable. She grew up as a half-orphaned child with an elderly and undemonstrative father would naturally grow,—shy, sensitive, timid, and extremely grave. ”

“ He saw nothing but the most innocent surprise and delight. All the slumbering poetry within her seemed to awaken at the presence of her beautiful neighbor,—as when one, for the first time, stands before the great revelations of Art. Mary's cheek glowed, her eyes seemed to grow deep with the enthusiasm of admiration, and, after a few moments, it seemed as if her delicate face and figure reflected the glowing loveliness of her visitor, just as the virgin snows of the Alps become incarnadine as they stand opposite the glorious radiance of a sunset sky. ”

“ Everything else is mimetic, phantasmal, tinkling. Deeply do the masters of the drama move us; but the Gospel cleaves, inworks, regenerates. In the theatre, the leading characters go off in death and despair, or with empty conceits and a forced frivolity; in the Gospel, tranquilly, grandly, they are dismissed to a serener life and a nobler probation. Who has not pitied the ravings of Lear and the agonies of Othello? The Gospel pities, but, by a magnificence of plot altogether its own, by preserving, if we may so say, the unities of heaven and earth, it also saves. ”

“ Of our distant home we remember not one dark day, not one servile care, nothing but the echo of its holy hymns and the radiance of its brightest days,—of our father, not one hasty word, but only the fulness of his manly vigor and noble tenderness,—of our mother, nothing of mortal weakness, but a glorified form of love,—of our brother, not one teasing, provoking word of brotherly freedom, but the proud beauty of his noblest hours,—of our sister, our child, only what is fairest and sweetest. ”

“ Incredible as it may seem, Virginie de Frontignac had never read a romance or work of fiction of which love was the staple; the régime of the convent in this regard was inexorable; at eighteen she was more thoroughly a child than most American girls at thirteen. On entrance into life, she was at first so dazzled and bewildered by the mere contrast of fashionable excitement with the quietness of the scenes in which she had hitherto grown up, that she had no time for reading or thought,—all was one intoxicating frolic of existence, one dazzling, bewildering dream. ”

“ We approach another observation, that there is no comedy in the Bible. There is tragedy there,—not in the sense in which we have just denied that the Jews had tragedy, but in the obvious sense of tragic elements, tragic scenes, tragic feelings. In the same sense, we say, there are no comic elements, or scenes, or feelings. There is that in the Bible to make you weep, but nothing to move you to laughter. Why is this? Are there not smiles as well as tears in life? Have we not a deep, joyous nature, as well as aspiration, reverence, awe? ”

“ There are scores of beggars on either side the road, screaming in chorus. No matter how far the town be from the city, there is not a wretched, maimed cripple of your acquaintance, not one of the old stumps who have dodged you round a Roman corner, not a ragged baron who has levied toll for passage through the public squares, a privileged robber who has shut up for you a pleasant street or waylaid you at an interesting church, but he is sure to be there. ”

“ Composed of such elements, one can scarcely imagine the body of Zouaves other than brilliant in the field of battle. The officers are generally chosen from the regiments of the line, men remarkable for strength, courage, and prudence; full of energy, pushing the love of their colors to its last limit, always ready to confront death and to run up to meet danger, they seek glory rather than promotion. To train up their soldiers, to give them an example, in their own persons, of all the military virtues,—such are their only cares. ”

“ Keen human legislation! sightless justice of men!—one drunken wretch smites another in a midnight brawl, and sends a soul to its account with one sharp shudder of passion and despair, and the maddened creature that remains on earth suffers the penalty of the law. Every sense sobered from its reeling fury, weeks of terribly expectation heaped upon the cringing soul, and, in full consciousness, that murderer is strangled before men and angels, because he was drunk!—necessary enough, one perceives, to the good of society, which thereby loses two worse than useless members ”

“ Those who have fought assure us that there is a positive pleasure in battle. That clever young woman, Miss Flora Mac-Ivor, who passed most of her life in the very highest fighting society, assures us, that men, when confronted with each other, have a certain instinct for strife, as we see in other male animals, such as dogs, bulls, and so forth. It is even so; and, further, the fondness that men have for accounts and details of battles is another evidence of the popularity of war, and an absolute stumbling-block in the way of the Peace Society, which has the hardest of combats to fight. ”

“ Blame her as you will, indignant maidens of Greenfield, Miss Flint, and Miss Sharp, and Miss Skinner! You may have had ten lovers and twenty flirtations apiece, and refused half-a-dozen good matches for the best of reasons; you, no doubt, would have known better than to marry a man who was a villain from his very physiognomy; but my heart must needs grow tender toward Miss Hyde; a great joy is as pathetic as a sorrow. ”

“ So she lived to find herself immured in this damp and crumbling house, with no society but a drinking and crime-haunted husband, and the ignorant negroes who served him,—society varied now and then by one or two men revolting enough in speech and aspect to drive Hitty to her own room, where, in a creaking chair, she rocked monotonously back and forth, watching the snapping fire, and dreaming dreams of a past that seemed now but a visionary paradise. ”

“ Will it be said that the dialogue of the Bible lacks the charm of poetry?—that its action and sentiment, its love and its sorrow, are not heightened by those efforts of the fancy which delight us in dramatic authors?—that its simplicity is bald, and its naturalness rough?—that its excessive familiarity repels taste and disturbs culture? If we may trust Wordsworth, simplicity is not inconsistent with the pleasures of the imagination. ”

“ She still thought, "He is so good to me!" still idealized the villain to a hero, and, like her kind, predestined to be the prey and the accusing angel of such men, prayed for and adored her husband as if he had been the best and tenderest of gentlemen. Providence has its mysteries; but if there be one that taxes faith and staggers patience more than another, it is the long misery that makes a good woman cringe and writhe and agonize in silence under the utter rule and life-long sovereignty of a bad man. Perhaps such women do not suffer as we fancy ”

“ Do you forget the angels who lost heaven for the daughters of men? Do you forget Helen, and the fair women who made mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was born? If jealousies that gnaw men's hearts out of their bodies,—if pangs that waste men to shadows and drive them into raving madness or moping melancholy,—if assassination and suicide are dreadful possibilities, then there is always something frightful about a lovely young woman.—I love to look at this "Rainbow," as her father used sometimes to call her, of ours. ”

“ Perkins, and, though she still staid by her old home and haunts, revenged herself on fate in general and her mistress in particular by a continual course of sulking, all the time hiding under this general quarrel with life a heart that ached with the purest tenderness and pity. So some people are made, like chestnuts; one gets so scratched and wounded in the mere attempt to get at the kernel within, that it becomes matter of question whether one does not suffer less from wanting their affection than from trying to obtain it. ”

“ But mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the Great Secret to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces of it. Sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty of a plain countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the lips of a woman, not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a message for us, and wait almost with awe to hear their accents. ”

“ Have they their worship, like religious beings, and are their midnight lays but the outpouring of the fervency of their spirits? Do they rejoice, like the clouds, in the presence of the moon, hailing her beams as a pleasant relief from the darkness that has surrounded them? Or in the silence of night, are their songs but responses to the sounds of the trees, when they bow their heads and shake their rustling leaves in the wind? When they listen to the streamlet, that makes audible melody only in the hush of night, do they not answer to it from their leafy perch? ”

“ From our daily lot falls off every weed of care,—from our heart-friends every speck and stain of earthly infirmity. Our horizon widens, and blue, and amethyst, and gold touch every object. Absent friends and friends gone on the last long journey stand once more together, bright with an immortal glow, and, like the disciples who saw their Master floating in the clouds above them, we say, "Lord, it is good to be here!" How fair the wife, the husband, the absent mother, the gray-haired father, the manly son, the bright-eyed daughter! Seen in the actual present, all have some fault, some flaw ”

“ It is the inspiration of that Spirit that is ever working with our spirit, and constantly lifting us higher than we know, and, by our wants, by our woes, by our tears, by our yearnings, by our poverty, urging us, with mightier and mightier force, against those chains of sin which keep us from our God. We speak not of things conventionally called prayers,—vain mutterings of unawakened spirits talking drowsily in sleep,—but of such prayers as come when flesh and heart fail, in mighty straits;—then he who prays is a prophet, and a Mightier than he speaks in him ”

“ Is it worse to ask than to seize? Is it meaner to thank than to threaten? If he who is supported by the public is a beggar, our kings are beggars, our pensions are charity. Did not the Princess Royal hold out her hand, the other day, to the House of Commons? and does any one think the worse of her for it? We are all, in measure, beggars; but Beppo, in the large style of kings and robber-barons, asks for his baiocco, and, like the merchant-princes, keeps his bank. ”

“ One thinks of him, and hopes that he is satisfied,—that cruel longing and more cruel doubt shall never spring up in that capacious heart, divorcing his affections and convictions from the system to which his life is irrevocably wedded. No, keep still, Padre Lluc I think ever as you think now, lest the faith that seems a fortress should prove a prison, the mother a step-dame,—lest the high, chivalrous spirit, incapable of a safe desertion, should immolate truth or itself on the altar of consistency. ”