Various

“ I want to breathe freely, and can't. I want to have leisure to observe the style, the development of character, the author's tone of thought, and not be galloped through on the back of a breathless desire to know "how they are coming out."
But, my dear plot-loving friend, be easy. I will not leave you in the lurch. I am not going to marry my man and woman out of hand. An obstacle, of which I suppose you have never heard,—an obstacle entirely new, fresh, and unhackneyed, will arise; so, I pray you, let patience have her perfect work.
Wonderful was the new world opened to Ivy Geer. ”

“ Disturbed by the sudden passion of the hitherto meek girl, I sat down on the wide steps of the balcony and essayed to draw her to my knee, hoping she would weep this grief away as she had often done a lesser sorrow. But she resisted my caress, and, standing erect before me, checked her tears, saying, in a voice still trembling with resentment and reproach,—
"You promised Jean to be kind to me, and you are cruel; for when I ask for love, you give me jewels, books, or flowers, as you would give a pettish child a toy, and go away as if you were weary of me. Oh, it is not right, Sir! ”

“ Did there ever appear on the earth another nation so fertile in contrasts, so extreme in its acts,—more under the dominion of feeling, less ruled by principle; always better or worse than was anticipated,—now below the level of humanity, now far above; a people so unchangeable in its leading features that it may be recognized by portraits drawn two or three thousand years ago, and yet so fickle in its daily opinions and tastes that it becomes at last a mystery to itself, and is as much astonished as strangers at the sight of what it has done ”

“ With the later works of the composer Oulibichef had no sympathy. Haydn and Mozart had given him his standards of perfection. We can forgive Beethoven, when at times he rises above all forms and rules in seeking new means of expression; Oulibichef could not.
But it is not endless discussions of Beethoven's works which the public—at all events, our public—demands. We wish his biography,—the history of his life. What has been given us does but whet the appetite. We wish to have the many original sources, still sealed to us, explored, and the results of this labor honestly given us. ”

“ If any man really wish to know how he is preaching, let him imagine himself conversing earnestly with an intelligent and highly gifted, but uneducated man or woman, in his own parlor, or with his younger children. Would any but an idiot keep on talking, when, with half an eye, he might discern TEDIOUS, wrought by himself, upon the uncalloused sensibilities of his hearers?
How long ought a sermon to be? As long as you can read in the eye of seven-eighths of your audience, Pray, go on. If you cannot read that, you have mistaken your vocation; you were never called to the ministry. ”

“ The grace of movement, the triumph of tact and ingenuity, the devotion to conventionalism, either pedantry or the genius of the hour, also rules the drama in Paris. With all its brilliancy, entertainment, grace, wit, and popularity,—there exists not a permanently vital and universally recognized type of this greatest department of literature, familiar and endeared alike to peasant and peer, a representative of humanity for all time,—like the bard around whose name and words cluster the Anglo-Saxon hearts and intelligence from generation to generation. ”

“ It is this fiery gleam on the surface of matter hot from chaos, which the multitude honor as the highest manifestation of genius. But this is to desecrate a word which implies constructive power of the first order. Form is its highest expression. Without the shaping faculty, which artistically rounds to perfection, no glitter of decoration, nor even force and fire of expression, can keep the work from falling into ruins. If the beautiful, as Goethe said, includes in it the good, then perfect beauty alone is everlasting. ”

“ In concluding this recognition of the contributions by France to screw-propulsion, it is desired to submit a few general observations on the French navy; for, although upon every sea the tri-color waves over ships proudly comparing with those under any other flag, it is nevertheless too commonly believed that the docks of France are crowded and her navy-list swollen with hulks which are but the mouldering mementos of the vast armaments hastily created during the Consulate and the Empire; an illusion most hazardous to our interests abroad and our security at home. ”

“ In New England she must keep a school. So, rising from one sphere to another, she at length finds herself the prima donna in the department of instruction in Mr. Silas Peckham's educational establishment.
What a miserable thing it is to be poor! She was dependent, frail, sensitive, conscientious. She was in the power of a hard, grasping, thin-blooded, tough-fibred, trading educator, who neither knew nor cared for a tender woman's sensibilities, but who paid her and meant to have his money's worth out of her brains, and as much more than his money's worth as he could get. ”

“ The student-habits of the clergy most naturally lead them to prefer the formal statement, the studied elaboration of ideas, which their own training cannot but render facile and dear to them. And there is here and there a man who, in virtue of extraordinary genius, can infuse new life into worn-out phrases,—a man or two who can for a moment or for an hour, by the very weight and excellence of their thoughts, and because they truly and deeply feel them, arrest the age, and challenge and secure attention, in spite of all the infelicities of an antiquated style and an unearthly delivery. ”

“ The fountain which leaps up fresh and living in every new life can never be exhausted till the springs of all life are dry. Tell me, O lover, gazing into those tender eyes uplifted to yours, twining the silken rings around your bronzed finger, pressing reverently the warm lips consecrated to you,—does it abate one jot or tittle of your happiness to know that eyes just as tender, curls just as silken, lips just as red, have stirred the hearts of men for a thousand years? ”

“ Sterne, long ago, remarked it of the fair shopkeepers. "The genius of a people," he says, "where nothing but the monarchy is Salique, having ceded this department totally to the women, by a continual higgling with customers of all ranks and sizes, from morning to night, like so many rough pebbles in a bag, by amicable collisions, they have worn down their asperities and sharp angles, and not only become round and smooth, but will receive, some of them, a polish like a brilliant." ”

“ But there were more serious objections, even than a landlady of shrill parables and an inquiring turn of mind, to my prolonging the delights of a residence at the first-class boarding-house of Mrs. Silvernail. Not the least of these was the fact of its being a boarding-house,—a community. In such communities, from the inevitable intercourse over the social board, your circle of acquaintance is always liable to be extended rather than improved. In them there is no escape from the disinterested offers of those who would be your perpetual friends. ”

“ She saw how love and beauty and freedom lay floating vaguely and aimlessly in a million minds till the poet came and crystallized them into clear-cut, prismatic words, tinged for each with the color of his own fancy, and wrought into a perfect mosaic, not for an age, but for all time. Led by a strong hand, she trod with reverent awe down the dim aisles of the Past, and saw how the soul of man, bound in its prison-house, had ever struggled to voice itself in words. ”

“ We have seen, we repeat, men and cities. We have dined at the Rocher de Cancale, the Maison Dorée, at Delmonico's, at German Gasthauses, at Italian Trattorias, at "Joe's" in London, the Trosachs Inn in the Highlands, and upon all peculiar and national dishes, from the sardines au gratin of Naples to the sauer kraut of Berlin, from the "one fish-ball" of Boston to the hog and hominy of Virginia,—but never yet upon any carte did we encounter "Cold Missionary" or "Enfans en potage Fijien."
Where, we repeat, is the Nursery Blarney-Stone? ”

“ The badges, the gardens, the smiles, the agreeable phrase, the keen repartee, the tempting dish, the ingenious vaudeville, the pretty foot, the elegant chair and becoming curtain, the extravagant gesture, the pointed epigram or alluring formula, must be taken as so many agreeabilities,—not for things performed, but imaginatively promised. The folly of war has been demonstrated to the entire sense of mankind; at best, it is now deemed a painful necessity; yet the most serious phase of life in France is military. ”

“ Nobody knows New England who is not on terms of intimacy with one of its elms. The elm comes nearer to having a soul than any other vegetable creature among us. It loves man as man loves it. It is modest and patient. It has a small flake of a seed which blows in everywhere and makes arrangements for coming up by-and-by. So, in spring, one finds a crop of baby-elms among his carrots and parsnips, very weak and small compared to those, succulent vegetables. The baby-elms die, most of them, slain, unrecognized or unheeded, by hand or hoe, as meekly as Herod's innocents. ”

“ And it should be with the ministry; but as things now are, with the conceptions of the ministry now entertained, pride interposes to forbid the rectification of the most serious mistakes. It is a question of dignity and of scholarship; whereas it should be a question of love to God and man, and of real ability and conscious power to bring them together,—to reconcile man to God.
Our age is an age of great devotion to secular affairs,—of men who are great in the conduct of such affairs,—in every department in life. ”

“ Here were sown the seeds of those heroic virtues which have since leaped into luxuriant life,—seeds of that irresistible power which fastened its grasp on Nature and forced her to unfold the secret of her creation,—seeds of that far-reaching wisdom which in the light of the unveiled past has read the story of the unseen future. ”

“ In our navy, away from our own coast, sail must of necessity be the rule, and steam the reserve or special power; and without abandonment of our anti-colonial policy—with the depots of our rivals upon every sea, yet not a ton of coal upon which we can rely—we should not dare to send abroad a single ship which, whenever she gets up her anchor, must needs also get up her steam.
Fortunately, in the creation of a steam-fleet, the United States will not have to encounter tedious and costly experiments, nor to incur the risk of failure. ”

“ I meant no wrong to Effie, but, looking on her as a child, I forgot the higher claim I had given her as a wife, and, walking blindly on my selfish way, I crushed the little flower I should have cherished in my breast. "Effie, my old friend Agnes Vaughan is coming here to-day; so make yourself fair, that you may do honor to my choice; for she desires to see you, and I wish my Scotch harebell to look lovely to this English rose," I said, half playfully, half earnestly, as we stood together looking out across the flowery lawn, one summer day.
"Do you like me to be pretty, Sir?" ”

“ The best form of hull, model of propeller, and plan of engine are already so well established, that it is not easy to fall into error; that which is most to be guarded against is the popular demand, the prevailing mania for high speed,—for which single advantage there is such a proneness to sacrifice every other warlike quality. That measure of speed or power which will enable a ship to stem the currents of rivers, to enter or leave a port in the face of a moderate gale, or to meet the dangers of a lee-shore, should, it is conceived by many, be sufficient ”

“ But whoever knows life in Paris, unrelieved by some consistent and individual purpose, will find it a succession of excitements, temporary, yet varied,—full of the agreeable, yet barren of consecutive interest and satisfactory results,—admirable as a recreative hygiene, deplorable as a permanent resource; their inevitable consequence being a faith in the external, a dependence on the immediate, and a habit of vagrant pleasure-seeking, which must at last cloy and harden the manly soul. ”

“ Cobbett made common-sense a social lever;—a British merchant or statesman attaches his name to a document in characters of such individuality that the signature is known at a glance; a French official invents a flourish so intricate that the forger's ingenuity is baffled in the attempt to imitate it;—government, on one side of the Channel, employs a taster to detect adulteration in wine whose sensitive palate is a fortune; on the other, the hereditary fame of a brewery is the guaranty of the excellence of ale. ”

“ Persons have been known to remove from the place, after a short residence in it, because they were haunted day and night by the thought of this awful green wall piled up into the air over their heads. They would lie awake of nights, thinking they heard the muffled snapping of roots, as if a thousand acres of the mountain-side were tugging to break away, like the snow from a house-roof, and a hundred thousand trees were clinging with all their fibres to hold back the soil just ready to peel away and crash down with all its rocks and forest-growths. ”

“ The want of directness, the absence of candor, the non-recognition of truth in its broad and deep sense, is, indeed, a characteristic phase of life, of expression, and of manners in France. A lover of his nation confesses that even in "galantes aventures l'esprit prenait la place du coeur, la fantaisie celle du sentiment." Voltaire's creed was, that "le mensonge n'est un vice que quand il fait du mal; c'est une grande vertu quand il fait du bien." ”