Various

“ Jacqueline knew little of it until now, as she walked toward the fields, by the side of Elsie Méril.
She saw how she had depended on the priest of Domrémy, as he had been the lawgiver and the leader of her life. A spiritual life, to be sustained only by the invisible spirit, to be lived by faith, not in man, but in God, without intervention of saint or angel or Blessed Virgin,—was the world's life liberated by such freedom?
By faith, and not by sight, the just must live. Would He bow his heavens and come down to dwell with the contrite and the humble? ”

“ And as Nature is the mirror of human life, so at the source of those vast movements by which she buries in oblivion her own works and the works of man there is hidden the type of human suffering, both for the race and the individual. And hence it is, that, over against the eternal solitude within us, there ever waits without us a second solitude, into which, sooner or later, we pass with restless flight,—a solitude vast, shadowy, and unfamiliar in its outline, but inevitable in its reality,—haunting, bewildering, overshadowing us! ”

“ So long as man and heroism and strife endure, shall Achilles, Godfrey, Satan, and Mephistopheles be types; for they are artistic expressions of essential and historical realities. But though the beck of curiosity lead us through the labyrinthine plot of a novel, long as Gibbon's way through the Dark Ages, yet, when we have finished it, the bubble collapses, the little heavens which had been framed about us roll away, and most rarely does a character remain poetically significant in the mind.
A contrast of any page of an epic with one of a romance will show their essential unlikeness. ”

“ The mind plays through all the realm of its knowledge and experience, and sheds sparks from all the torches of thought, as scenes and topics succeed each other. The pure forms of literature may be reminiscences present to the imagination, the germs of new truths and social arrangements may occupy the reason; but the novelist is neither practical, nor philosophical, nor artistic; he is simply in a dream; and pictures of the world and fragments of old ideas pass before him, as the sacred meanings of religion flitted about the populace in a grotesque mediæval festival of the Church. ”

“ The novelist is one of the number who half comprehend them, and borrows them from all quarters to introduce into the rich mélange of his work. To solve a social problem, to reproduce an historical age or character, or to develop the truth and poetry latent in any event, is difficult, and not many will either lead or follow a severe attempt; but the novelist will merrily chronicle his story and link with it in a thousand ways some salient reminiscences of life and thought.
What, then, is the highest excellence that the novel can attain? It is the carnival of literary art. ”

“ Yet between the vocal story and the story in literature there is an immense difference, like that between talking and writing, between life and art. The qualities which in the story-teller make even frivolity weighty and dulness significant—the play of the eye, the lips, the countenance, the voice, the whole sympathetic expression of the person—are wanting to the novel; it has passed from the realm of life to that of art; it loses the charm which personal relations give even to trifles; it must have the charm which the mind can lend only to its cherished offspring. ”

“ They who gape, horror-struck, at the endless revelations of chemistry, without giving reason time to act, err in the second manner. Led away by the brilliant hues and wonderful transformations of the laboratory, they forget the size of the world outside, in which these changes are enacted, and the quiet way in which Nature works. The breath of chlorine is deadly, but we daily eat it in safety, wrapped in its poison-proof envelope of sodium, as common salt. Carbonic acid is among the gases most hostile to man, but he drinks it in soda-water or Champagne with impunity. ”

“ The essential connection of the power of landscape with human emotion is not less certain because in many impressive pictures the link is slight or local. That the connection should exist at a single point is all that we need.... That difference, and more, exists between the power of Nature through which humanity is seen, and her power in the desert. Desert,—whether of leaf or sand,—true desertness, is not in the want of leaves, but of life. Where humanity is not and was not, the best natural beauty is more than vain. ”

“ Beneath the brooding spirit of a new civilization signs of life had at length appeared, and Europe became vocal in every part with fantastic poems, lyrical in the South, epical in the North. They were wildly exuberant products, because severe art was unknown, but simple, naïve, and gay, and suited to the taste of a time when the classics were regarded as superstitiously as the heavens. Love and heroism, which somehow are the leading themes of literature in all ages, now assumed the chivalric type in the light hands of the earliest modern poets. ”

“ To visit the mother of John Leclerc. She must carry back the tracts the good woman had lent her. Their contents had firm lodgement in her memory.
Others might run to and fro in the streets, and talk about the corners, and prognosticate with passion, and defy, in the way of cowardice, where safety rather than the truth is well assured. If one woman could console another, Jacqueline wished that she might console Leclerc's mother. And if any words of wisdom could drop from the poor old woman's lips while her soul was in this strait, Jacqueline desired to hear those words. ”

“ TOBACCO. "Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases! a good vomit, I confess, a virtuous herb, if it be well qualified, opportunely taken, and medicinally used. But as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lauds, health: hellish, devilish, and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul!"—BURTON. Anatomy of Melancholy. ”

“ I have seen that it is possible for the stranger to pass through this great chapel, with its font of waters, and mountain pillars, and vaults of cloud, without being touched by one noble thought or stirred by any sacred passion; but for those who received from its waves the baptism of their youth, and learned beneath its rocks the fidelity of their manhood, and watched amidst its clouds the likeness of the dream of life, with the eyes of age,—for these I will not believe that the mountain-shrine was built or the calm of its forest-shadows guarded by their God in vain. ”

“ At length they rested from their journey to hold a council on modern literature. The long results of Christian time were unrolled before them as in a chart. They beheld the dawn of a new historic day, marked by songs of fantastic tenderness, and unwieldy, long, and jointless romances and poems, like the monsters which played in the unfinished universe before the creation of man. The Muses smiled with a look more of complaisance than approval, as they reviewed the army of Troubadours and Minnesingers and the crowd of romancers who followed in their train. ”

“ The epic movement of Eleusinian triumph was in its range as unlimited as the movement of sorrow. Each found expression in sculptured monument,—the one hinting of flight into darkness, and the other of resurrection into light; each in its cycle inclosed the world; each widened into the invisible; as the wail of Achtheia reached the heart of Hades, so the paean of Dionysus was lost in the heavens. ”

“ Thus the modern novel had its genesis not merely in a contemplative mood, but in contemplation which was forced by the impetuous temper of the times to fail of ever reaching the dignity of thoughtfulness. It was the immature product of an immature mental state; and richly as sometimes it was endowed by every human faculty, by imagination, wit, taste, or even profound thought, it yet never reached the goal of thought, never solved a problem, and, in its highest examples, professed only to reveal, but not to guide, the reigning manners and customs. ”

“ The statesman, in the moment of debate, and in the dignity of conscious power, finds sympathy and encouragement in a passage of his favorite epic. Its grand types are ever in fellowship with high thoughts. The novel is for the lighter moment after the deed is done, when he is no longer brunting Fate, but reclining idly, and reflecting humorously or malignly on this life. The epic is closely and strongly framed, like the gladiator about to strike a blow: the novel is relaxed and at careless ease, like the club-man after lighting his pipe. ”

“ The fashions of life are bubbles on the surface, and pass away with the season; but the creations of art belong to the depths of the spiritual world, where they shine like stars and systems in the physical universe.
Story-telling is the most charming of occupations, and, whatever its relation to literary art, it is one of the graces of the art of life. Old as the race, it has always been in fashion on the earth, the delight of every clime from the Orient to the Occident, and of every age from childhood to second childhood. ”

“ Indeed, is it not true that whatsoever is most sensuous in connection with human joy, and at the same time pure, is the very flower of life, and therefore the most consummate revelation of holiness? Nothing in Nature is so intensely solemn as her summer, in its infinite fulness of growth and the unmeasured altitude of its heavens. And within the range of human associations which shall we select as revealing the most profound solemnity? ”

“ Bernard's small menagerie suggested to him was the grave, though somewhat worn, subject of the origin of evil. There is now to be seen in a tall glass jar, in the Museum of Comparative Anatomy at Cantabridge in the territory of the Massachusetts, a huge crotalus, of a species which grows to more frightful dimensions than our own, under the hotter skies of South America. Look at it, ye who would know what is the tolerance, the freedom from prejudice, which can suffer such an incarnation of all that is devilish to lie unharmed in the cradle of Nature! ”

“ Hence the difficulty of thorough thought, of faithful intellectual performance, of artistic creation. To the thoughtless man life is merely the rough and monotonous exterior of the cameo-stone; but the artist sees through its strata, discerns its layers of many colors, and from its surface to its vital centre works them all together into varied beauty. To live is common; but art belongs only to the finest minds and the best moments. Life is a burden of present multitudinous phenomena; but art has the simple unity of perfect science, and is a goal and aspiration. ”

“ But there is no rest or joy in Nature to the agitated and foreboding spirit. Must we not have conquered the world, if we serenely enter into Nature's rest?
Fain would Jacqueline have turned her face and steps in another direction that night than toward the road that led to Meaux: to the village on the border of the Vosges,—to the ancient Domrémy. Once her home was there; but Jacqueline had passed forth from the old, humble, true defences: for herself must live and die.
Domrémy had a home for her no more. The priest, on whom she had relied when all failed her, was still there, it is true ”

“ Human weakness makes poetry, philosophy, and history imperfect in execution, though they aspire to absolute beauty and truth; human weakness suggested the novel, which is imperfect in design, written as an amusement and relief, in despair of sounding the universe. A novel is in its nature and as a matter of necessity an artistic failure; it pretends to nothing higher; but under the slack laws which govern its composition, multitudes of fine and suggestive characters, incidents, and sayings may be smuggled into it, contrary to all the usages and rules of civilized literature. ”

“ But, thus left alone, the face of Jacqueline expressed both sorrow and indignation. She would exact nothing of Elsie; but latterly how often had she expected of her companion more than she gave or could give!
Of course the young girl was equal to others in pity and surprise; but there were people in the world beside the wool-comber and his mother. Nothing of vast import was suggested by his sentence to her mind. She did not see that spiritual freedom was threatened with destruction. If she heard the danger questioned, she could not apprehend it. ”

“ She remembered these years of wrong and of extortion,—they received their proper name now,—years whose mirth and leisure she had quietly foregone, but during which she had borne a burden that saddened youth, while it also dignified it,—a burden which had made her heart's natural cheerfulness the subject of self-reproach, and her maiden dreams and wishes matter for tears, for shame, for confession, for prayer.
Now Victor Le Roy's words came to her very strangely; powerfully they moved her. She believed them in this solitude, where at leisure she could meditate upon them. ”

“ The Territories belong to the nation. Every citizen has equal rights to them and in them. Why, therefore, may not a Southern man, as well as a Northern man, go into them with his property? What right has Congress to place the South under an ignominious bar of restriction? The Constitution declares that slaves are property; that all the States and the people have equal rights. The Territories belong to all. Therefore, under the Constitution, they should be enjoyed by all.
"By this ingenious logic the Kansas and Nebraska Bill is made to contradict itself. ”

“ Small-featured and large-minded Greece is thus set in contrast with Asia, where the mind and body were equally palsied in the effort to overcome immense plains and interminable mountain-chains. But whatever the reason, whether geographical or ethnological, it is certain that the people of Greece were endowed with a transcendent genius for art, which embraced all departments of life as by an instinct. Every divinity was made a plain figure to the mind, every mystery was symbolized in some positive beautiful myth, and every conception of whatever object became statuesque and clear. ”

“ If the prose romance be not Hellenic, it is nevertheless humane, and has been in honor almost universally throughout the Orient and the Occident. Its absence from the classical literature was a marvel and exception, a phenomenon of the clearest-minded and most active of races, who thought, but did not contemplate,—whose ideal world consisted only of simple, but stately legends of bright-limbed gods and heroes. A felicitous production of high art, also, is among the rarest of exceptions, and will be till the Millennium. ”

“ How could they, then, connecting, as they did, all victory with hope,—how could they fall short of the most exalted hope, of the most excellent victory; especially in instances like the one now under our notice, where the material circumstances of the conquest as well as of the conqueror's life have passed out of remembrance; when for generations men have dwelt upon the dim tradition in their thoughts, and it has had time to grow into its fullest significance,—even finding an elaborate expression in sacred writings, in symbolic ritual, and monumental entablature? ”

“ I will follow John; and when they bind him, I will let him see his mother's eyes are on him,—blessing him, my child!—Hark! how they talk through the streets!—Jacqueline, he was never a coward. He is strong, too. They will not kill him, and they cannot make him dumb. He will hold the truth the faster for all they do to him. Jesus Christ on his side, do you think he will fear the city, or all Paris, or all France? He does not know what it is to be afraid. ”

“ The cultured intellect will not seriously work short of a final principle; and if a materialized religion, an ecclesiastical structure, be firmly planted on the earth by the same hand that established the universe and tapestried it with morning and evening, and if its gates and archways, its altar, columns, and courts be given in trust to chosen stewards as a divine priesthood, then the highest problem of being is not a human problem, and the mind of the laity has nothing more important to do than to play with the flowers of gallant love and heroism. ”