Various

“ Should you, James, think of yourself only?"
"I do nor, I trust, think of myself only," said James; "I hope that I am calm enough, and have a heart to think for others. But, I ask you, is it doing right to him to let him marry you in ignorance of the state of your feelings? Is it a kindness to a good and noble man to give yourself to him only seemingly, when the best and noblest part of your affections is gone wholly beyond your control? I am quite sure of that, Mary. I know you do love him very well,—that you would make a most true, affectionate, constant wife to him ”

“ At last this enchanting approach brought us to the outskirts of Rivas, and we entered a narrow, mud-walled street, and never halted until we came out upon the central and only plaza of the miserable town. Our incumbered march, without breakfast, after a long, inactive sea-voyage, had wearied us sadly; and we threw our luggage upon, the ground, lay down upon it, and ruminated on a scene of little comfort to the faint-hearted, if there were any such in our little crowd of world-battered and battering strong men, topers, and vagabonds. ”

“ How we all like the spirting up of a fountain, seemingly against the law that makes water everywhere slide, roll, leap, tumble headlong, to get as low as the earth will let it! That is genius. But what is this transient upward movement, which gives us the glitter and the rainbow, to that unsleeping, all-present force of gravity, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, (if the universe be eternal,) —the great outspread hand of God himself, forcing all things down into their places, and keeping them there? ”

“ Yes, the world is visibly shrinking in the hard grip of commerce, and the magic and the marvels that filled our childish souls with adventurous longing are fading away in the change. Let us make haste, then, before it is too late,—before the very Sphinx is guessed, and the Boodh himself baptized in Croton water; and, like the Dutchmen in Hans Christian Andersen's story, who put on the galoches of happiness and stepped out into the Middle Ages, let us slip our feet into the sandals of imagination and step out into the desert or the jungle. ”

“ Poor Hepsy Ann! what need to describe the long-drawn agony which grew with the summer flowers, but did not wane with the summer sun? Hour after hour, day after day, she sat by her pantry-window, looking with wistful eyes out upon the sand, to that spot where the ill-fated "Miranda" had last been seen, but never should appear again,—another
"poor lone Hannah, Sitting by the window, binding shoes,"—
cheeks paling, eyes dimming, with that hope deferred which maketh the heart sick. Pray God you never may be so tried, fair reader! ”

“ And yet, when a strong brain is weighed with a true heart, it seems to me like balancing a bubble against a wedge of gold.
——It takes a very true man to be a fitting companion for a woman of genius, but not a very great one. I am not sure that she will not embroider her ideal better on a plain ground than on one with a brilliant pattern already worked in its texture. But as the very essence of genius is truthfulness, contact with realities, (which are always ideas behind shows of form or language,) nothing is so contemptible as falsehood and pretence in its eyes. ”

“ She lays down a large and generous plan, and erects a building worthy of her ancient fame, worthy to increase the love and honor in which she is held,—a building that adds a new beauty to her old beauties of hall and chapel, of quadrangle and cloister. She does not mistake parsimony for economy; she does not neglect to regard the duty that lies upon her, as the guardian and instructress of youth, to set before their eyes models of fair proportion, noble structures which shall exercise at once an influence to refine the taste and the sentiment and to enlarge the intellect. ”

“ A man thinks small things of himself, and his neighbors think less, if he does not find his heart filled with an insane desire, in some way, to attain to fame or notoriety, riches or bankruptcy. Nevertheless, we are not purse-proud,—nor, indeed, proud at all, more's the pity,—and receive a man just as readily whose sands of life have been doled out to suffering humanity in the shape of patent pills, as one who has entered Fifth Avenue by the legitimate way of pork and cotton speculations, if only he have been successful,—which I call a very noble trait in the American character. ”

“ Tell me, ma belle!"
"I only saw him a little while," said Mary, "and I felt a great deal more than I saw. He could not have been any clearer to me than he always has been in my mind."
"But I think," said Madame de Frontignac, seating Mary, as was her wont, and sitting down at her feet, "I think you are a little triste about this. Very likely you pity the good priest. It is sad for him; but a good priest has the Church for his bride, you know."
"You do not think," said Mary, speaking seriously, "that I shall break my promise given before God to this good man?" ”

“ One who expressed his Oriental experiences in an epic of fresh and thrilling sensations has written,—"If a man be not born of his mother with a natural Chifney bit in his mouth, there comes to him a time for loathing the wearisome ways of society,—a time for not liking tamed people,—a time for not dancing quadrilles,—a time for pretending that Milton, and Shelley, and all sorts of mere dead people are greater in death than the first living lord of the treasury,—a time, in short, for scoffing and railing, for speaking lightly of the opera, and all our most cherished institutions. ”

“ Scudder came to tell him of Mary's consent. He made a gesture backward, without speaking, that she should leave the apartment; and Miss Prissy left, with a guilty kind of feeling, as if she had been striking a knife into her pastor, and, rushing distractedly across the entry into Mary's little bedroom, she bolted the door, threw herself on the bed, and began to cry.
"Well, I've done it!" she said to herself. "He's a very strong, hearty man," she soliloquized, "so I hope it won't put him in a consumption;—men do go into a consumption about such things sometimes. ”

“ The Little Gentleman lies where he longed to He, among the old names and the old bones of the old Boston people. At the foot of his resting-place is the river, alive with the wings and antennae of its colossal water-insects; over opposite are the great war-ships, and the long guns, which, when they roar, shake the soil in which he lies; and in the steeple of Christ Church, hard by, are the sweet chimes which are the Boston boy's Ranz des Vaches, whose echoes follow him all the world over. ”

“ I had witnessed those monstrous sacrileges, and survived,—had even, when locomotive and steamer were passed, picked up my beautiful fictions again, and called back my panic-stricken elephants with the gong of imagination; but here were Gulliver and Aladdin and Sinbad the Sailor torn from their golden thrones, and this insolent De Sauty, crowned with zinc and copper and sceptred with gutta-percha, set up in their places to the tune of "All Eight." ”

“ In the whole breadth of the continent there is not a single building of such beauty as to be an object of national pride, and few which will have any value in future times, except as historic records of the poverty of sentiment and the deficiency of character of the men of this generation.
Our oldest and best endowed University has, like Oxford, lately engaged in the erection of a Museum, which, though more limited in its general object, has yet a scope of such large and generous proportion as to make it a work of even more than national interest. ”

“ Her building is to have an aspect that shall correspond to the nobility of its function,—that shall impress the student, as he walks along the hard and dry paths of science, with some sense, faint though it be, of the beauty of that learning which is furnished with so goodly an abode. The influence of a fine building, complete in all its parts, is one which cannot be estimated in money, cannot be investigated by any practical process, but which is nevertheless as strong and precious as it is secret, as constant as it is unobserved. ”

“ As long as you are journeying in the interior of the desert, you have no particular point to make for as your resting-place. The endless sands yield nothing but small stunted shrubs; even these fail after the first two or three days; and from that time you pass over broad plains, you pass over newly reared hills, you pass through valleys that the storm of the last week has dug; and the hills and the valleys are sand, sand, sand, still sand and only sand, and sand and sand again. The earth is so samely, that your eyes turn toward heaven,—toward heaven, I mean, in the sense of sky. ”

“ Franklin had suggested this, half in jest, years before; Condorcet believed and asserted it now. Ignorance and misery, at all events, should come to an end. When kings and a wicked self-seeking aristocracy should be swept away, the divine sense of right, which God had implanted in the people, would rule; there could be no wars; armies and fleets would become useless; taxes would amount to nothing. All the nations would form one grand republic, with a universal convention sitting at the world's centre, to watch over the rights of man! ”

“ He is even more uncommon than a genius of the first order. Most men dress themselves for their autobiographies, as Machiavelli used to do for reading the classics, in their best clothes; they receive us, as it were, in a parlor chilling and awkward from its unfamiliarity with man, and keep us carefully away from the kitchen-chimney-corner, where they would feel at home, and would not look on a lapse into nature as the unpardonable sin. But what do we want of a hospitality that makes strangers of us, or of confidences that keep us at arm's-length? ”

“ Now I don't know, unhappily, the common process of growth of the artistic mind, and how far the light of today helps the neophyte to look into the indefinite twilight of to-morrow; but step by step was the slow rule of Elkanah's mind, and he had been now five years an artist, and was held in no despicable repute by those few who could rightly judge of a man's future by his past, when first it became very clear to him that he had yet to find his speciality in Art,—that truth which he might better represent than any other man. ”

“ Whatever teaches a child to observe teaches him to think, and strengthens memory, a faculty which in fitting conjunction is cumulative genius.
We dislike the science that is sometimes forced down youthful throats by the Mrs. Squeerses of polite learning, a vile compound of treacle and brimstone; but there is a vast difference between science as dead fact and science as living poetry,—the harvest of the child's own eyes, gathered on seashores and hillsides, in fields and lanes. ”

“ He had no printed books, no newspaper, no steam caravans, no forks, no soap, none of the thousand cheap conveniences which have become matters of necessity to our modern civilization. Above all things, if he aspired to know as well as to enjoy, he found knowledge not diffused everywhere about him, so that a day's labor would buy him more wisdom than a year could master, but held in private hands, hoarded in precious manuscripts, to be sought for only as gold is sought in narrow fissures and in the bed of brawling streams. ”

“ Scudder's face brightened.
"That is my own daughter! I might have known that you would do so. You would not, certainly, so cruelly disappoint a noble man who has set his whole faith upon you."
"No, mother, I shall not disappoint him. I told James that I should be true to my word."
"He will probably see the justice of it," said Mrs. Scudder, in that easy tone with which elderly people are apt to dispose of the feelings of young persons. "Perhaps it may be something of a trial, at first."
Mary looked at her mother with incredulous blue eyes. ”

“ I know that man, Marie,—and I know, that, sinful as he may be before Infinite Purity, he is not so much more sinful than all the other men of his time. Have I not been in America? I know Jefferson; I knew poor Hamilton,—peace be with the dead! Neither of them had a life that could bear the sort of trial to which Burr's is subjected. When every secret fault, failing, and sin is dragged out, and held up without mercy, what man can stand? ”

“ There is a class of good women who have no right to marry perfectly good men, because they have the power of saving those who would go to ruin but for the guiding providence of a good wife. I have known many such cases. It is the most momentous question a woman is ever called upon to decide, whether the faults of the man she loves are beyond remedy and will drag her down, or whether she is competent to be his earthly redeemer and lift him to her own level.
A person of genius should marry a person of character. Genius does not herd with genius. ”

“ Sometimes the columns of light appear to come out of the brilliant arc mingled with blackish rays, resembling a thick smoke; sometimes they rise simultaneously from different points of the horizon, and unite themselves into a sea of flames, the magnificence of which no painting could express; for, at each instant, rapid undulations cause their form and brilliancy to vary. Motion appears to increase the visibility of the phenomena. Around the point in the heaven which corresponds to the direction of the dipping needle produced, the rays appear to meet and form the boreal corona. ”

“ The conjectures of Miss Prissy in regard to the grand house which James was to build for his bride were as speedily as possible realized. On a beautiful elevation, a little out of the town of Newport, rose a fair and stately mansion, whose windows overlooked the harbor, and whose wide, cool rooms were adorned by thy constant presence of the sweet face and form which has been the guiding star of our story. The fair poetic maiden, the seeress, the saint, has passed into that appointed shrine for woman, more holy than cloister, more saintly and pure than church or altar,—a Christian home. ”

“ By the stillness of the sharpened features, by the blankness of the tearless eyes, by the fixedness of the smileless mouth, by the deadening tints, by the contracted brow, by the dilating nostril, we know that the soul is soon to leave its mortal tenement, and is already closing up its windows and putting out its fires.—Such was the aspect of the face upon which the divinity-student looked, after the brief silence which followed his prayer. ”

“ The temper of our people, the wide field for their energies, the development of the so-called practical traits of character under the stimulus of our political and social institutions, the solitary dissociation of America from the history and the achievements of the Old World, the melancholy absence of monuments of past greatness and worth,—these and many other circumstances peculiar to our position all serve to weaken the general interest in what are called classical studies, and to direct the attention of the most ambitious and active minds far too exclusively to the pursuits of science. ”

“ Whose can it be?"
"A Cape-Cod fisherman's."
"But he is a genius!" cried I, enthusiastically.
"A great, a splendid genius!" said my friend, quietly.
"And a fisherman?"
"Yes, and shoemaker."
"What a magnificent career he might make! Why don't you help him? What a pity to bury such a man in fish-boots and cod-livers!"
"My dear——," said Captain Eastwick, "you are a goose. The highest genius lives above the littleness of making a career. This man needs no Academy prizes or praises. To my mind, his is the noblest, happiest life of all." ”