Various

“ If you are going to Italy,—and as all the world now goes to Italy, you will join the endless caravan, of course,—it becomes a matter of no small importance for you to know the signs by which you may recognize the fascinator, and the means by which you may avert his evil influence; for, should you fall in his way and be unprotected, direful, indeed, might be the consequences. Sudden disease, like a pestilence at mid-day, might seize you, and on those lovely shores you might pine away and die. Dreadful accidents might overwhelm you and bury all your happiness forever. ”

“ In the world he will see a larger chess-field, and one also shaped by the severest mathematics: the world is so because the brain of man is so,—motive and move, motive and move: they sum up life, all life,—from the aspen-leaf turning its back to the wind, to the ecstasy of a saint. See the array of pawns (forces, as the Hindoo calls them) : the bodily presence and abilities, power of persistence, endurance, nerve, the eye, the larynx, the tongue, the senses. Do they not exist in life as on the board, to cut the way for royal or nobler pieces? ”

“ Did the heart of stone within him know its ancestry,—track its hard, loveless descent from the Sphinx's children?
Then a Queen;—a solitary woman, proud of her solitude, isolated in her regnant splendor, a dead planet like the moon, sung and pictured and adored, but keeping on her majestic path in awful beauty, deaf to human entreaty, cold to human love; a great statesman in a queen's robes; a keen, subtle politician, coifed and farthingaled; a revengeful sovereign; a deadly enemy; a woman who forgave nothing to a woman, and retaliated everything upon a man ”

“ Mightier and mightier grew the yearning within her, as the full moon floated upward from the east and cast her dewy dreams over land and sea. The hour was come; the whole impulse and persistence of her nature went out in vivid life, and, filling the very stones which the winds had gathered and piled against her breast, cleft them with its sentient spell, clothed them with lean flesh and wiry sinews, shaped them after the fashion of the Desert men, and sent them out alive with intellect and will, but with hearts of flint, into the wide world,—the Sphinx's children! ”

“ Why may we not (just for this summer) believe in Transmigrations, and find some elder civilization embodied in this community of birds,—all those lost arts taken wings, not to fly away, but to come flitting and building in our trees, picking crumbs from our door-steps?
Do they say birds are limited? Who are we that set bounds to this direct knowledge, this instinct? Mathematical, constructive, they certainly are. What bold architect has builded so snug, so airy a house,—well concealed, and yet with a good outlook? We make our dwellings conspicuous; they hide their pretty art. ”

“ A quiet, contemplative age is not an artistic one; art has ever flourished in stirring times: Grecian wars and Guelphic strife have been its fostering influences. An artist is very far from being an idle dreamer; he works as hard as the merchant or the mechanic,—works, too, physically as well as mentally, with his hand as well as his head.
This is all statement: let us have some facts; let us embody our ideas. Do you not call Meyerbeer, with his years of study and effort and application, a worker? Do you not call Verdi, who has produced thirty operas, a worker? ”

“ THE REPRESENTATIVE ART. No art is worth anything that does not embody an idea,—that is not representative: otherwise, it is like a body without a soul, or the image of some divinity that never had existence. Art needs, indeed, to be individualized, to betray the characteristics of the artist, to be himself infused into his work; but more than this, it needs to typify, to illustrate the character of the age,—to be of a piece with other expressions of the sentiment that animates other men at the time. ”

“ I do not mean that, Mac,—not the mere mechanical warp and woof of it, to hang beggars and sots with,—but the more potent essence, the inner cosmic power of it, to rouse the soul into grand expansive consciousness, and then to suspend it far above the carks and cares of this weary world, to sew it aloft to some leaf of the Tree of Life, like the nest of Jean Paul's tailor-bird, that it may swing there, above the hum and dust of matter, swayed and sung to sleep by the expanding breath of Infinity! ”

“ But wherever two natures have a great deal in common, the conditions of a first-rate quarrel are furnished ready-made. Relations are very apt to hate each other just because they are too much alike. It is so frightful to be in an atmosphere of family idiosyncrasies; to see all the hereditary uncomeliness or infirmity of body, all the defects of speech, all the failings of temper, intensified by concentration, so that every fault of our own finds itself multiplied by reflections, like our images in a saloon lined with mirrors! Nature knows what she is about. ”

“ Here and there a monk, fresh from his Desert-Laura, hurtles through the eclipse-light of history like the stone from a catapult,—rules a church with iron rods, organizes, denounces, intrigues, executes, keeps an unarmed soldiery to do his behests, and hurls ecclesiastic thunders at kings and emperors with the grand audacity of a commission presumedly divine, while Greeks cringe, and Jews blaspheme, and heathen flee into, or away from, conversion; and the Church itself canonizes this spiritual father, this Sphinx-son of an instinct and a stone! ”

“ Ah! you know nothing, hear nothing of woman's rights up there, in that well-ordered household. Were it not well, if we, too, could give up our royal right of choice,—if we could fall back on our strong earth-born instincts, to be, to know, to do, one thing?
See how closely our darling curls up his slender black feet and legs, that we may not see this one bit of mortality about him! No, my little immortal does not touch the earth; he hangs suspended by that long bill, which just tethers him to its flowers. ”

“ You who think that art is an interest unworthy of men who live in the world, that it is a thing apart, what say you to the French, the most actual, the most practical, the most worldly of peoples, and yet the fondest of art in all its phases,—the French, who remembered the statues in the Tuileries amid the massacres of the First Revolution, and spared the architecture of antiquity when they bombarded the city of the Caesars? ”

“ All these different kinds of fascination have now become united together and go under the general name of Jettatura, in Italy, though the eye is considered as the most potent and terrible charmer. The superstition is universal, and pervades all modes of thought among the ignorant classes, but its sanctuary is Naples. There it is as much a matter of faith as the Madonna and San Gennaro. Every coral-shop is filled with amulets, and everybody wears a counter-charm,—ladies on their arms, gentlemen on their watch-chains, lazzaroni on their necks. ”

“ A dangerous-looking fellow for a rival, if one took a fancy to the dark girl! And who is she, and what?—by what demon is she haunted, by what taint is she blighted, by what curse is she followed, by what destiny is she marked, that her strange beauty has such a terror in it, and that hardly one shall dare to love her, and her eye glitters always, but warms for none?
Some of these questions are ours. Some were Helen Darley's. Some of them mingled with the dreams of Bernard Langdon, as he slept the night after meeting the strange horseman. ”

“ But chess has, by the experiences of many, sufficiently proved itself to have serious uses to men of thought, and in the way of an intellectual gymnasium. It is to the limbs and sinews of the mind—prudence, foresight, memory, combination, analysis—just what a gymnasium is to the body. In it every muscle, every joint of the understanding is put under drill; and we know, that, where the mind does not have exercise for its body, but relics simply on idle cessation for its reinforcement, it will get too much lymph. Work is worship; but work without rest is idolatry. ”

“ They make their successful generals Presidents; they give dinners to Morphy and banquets to Cyrus Field. They are thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the age. Therefore they are artistic.
How amazed some will be at the proposition,—amazed that the age should be called an artistic one,—amazed that Americans should be considered an artistic nation! Yet art is only the expression in outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual grace,—the sacrament of the imagination. ”

“ Or an Emperor exalted himself above the legions and the populace of Rome, banqueted his enemies and beheaded them at table, drank in the sight of blood and the sound of human shrieks as if they were his natural light and air, tormented God's creatures and cursed his kind, kindled a fire among the miserable myriads of his own city, and, exulting in a safe height, mixed the leaping, frantic discords of his own music with the horrid sounds of the hell's tragedy below him ”

“ In New York, Boston, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, there are buildings exclusively appropriated to this new form of art, this exotic, expensive amusement. These opera-houses, too, illustrate most aptly the progress of other arts. They are adorned with painting and gilding and carving; they are as sumptuous in accommodation as the palaces of European potentates; they are lighted with a brilliancy that Aladdin's garden never rivalled; they are thronged, with crowds as gayly dressed as those that fill the saloons of Parisian belles ”

“ The charm of a landscape is entireness, unity; it strikes the eye at once and as a whole. Examination of the component parts is quite a different thing. Who ean build up a view in his mind by piling up details like bricks upon one another? Most people, I suspect, will find, as I do, that, no matter what author they may be reading, the same picture always presents itself. A vague outline of some view they have seen arises in the memory,—like the forest scene in a scantily furnished theatre, which comes on for every play. ”

“ Can you not read in the colors on Turner's canvas, can you not see in the rush of Church's Niagara, can you not hear in the strains of the Traviata, can you not perceive in the tones and looks of Ristori, just what you find in the successful men in other spheres of life? Rothschild's fortune speaks no more plainly than the Robert le Diable; George Sand's novels and Carlyle's histories tell the same story as Kossuth's eloquence and Garibaldi's deeds. The artists are as alive to-day as any in the the world. For, again and again, art is not an outside thing ”

“ So Naaman dipt in Jordan,—a task unto him, a sin in the eyes of his gods, and painful exceedingly to his pride-gorged humor, that would only have Abana and Pharpar,—yet only so was his skin made whole again, and soft like an infant's. So also did David the king come into tasting of the bliss of a true repentance by the terrible gateways of shameful adultery and blood-thirst."
"Oh, I agree with your author perfectly," said Mac, with inimitable gravity, while I gazed at Clarian, wondering what would come next. "All the greatest gifts man possesses have had evil sponsors or unrighteous baptism. ”

“ Bernard was as good-natured and hopeful as ever. He had the great advantage, from his professional training, of knowing how to recognize and deal with the nervous disturbances to which overtasked women are so liable. He saw well enough that Helen Darley would certainly kill herself or lose her wits, if he could not lighten her labors and lift off a large part of her weight of cares. The worst of it was, that she of those women who naturally overwork themselves, like those horses who will go at the top of their pace until they drop. Such women are dreadfully unmanageable. ”

“ The American people surely represents the century,—has much of its spirit: is full of unrest; is eminently practical, but practical only in embodying poetical or lofty ideas; is demonstrative and excitable; resembles the French much and in many things,—the French, who are at the head of modern and European civilization,—who think and feel deeply, but do not keep their feelings hidden. The Americans, too, like expression: when they admire a Kossuth or a Jenny Lind, a patriot exile or a foreign singer, all the world is sure to know of their admiration ”

“ Voltaire called it "the one, of all games, which does most honor to the human mind."
"When an Eastern guest was asked if he knew anything in the universe more beautiful than the gardens of his host, which lay, an ocean of green, broad, brilliant, enchanting, upon the flowery margin of the Euphrates, he replied,—'Yes, the chess-playing of El-Zuli.'" Surely, the compliment, though Oriental, is not without its strict truth. When Nature rises up to her culmination, the human brain, and there reveals her potencies of insight, foresight, analysis, memory, we are touched with a mystic beauty ”