Various

“ The especial weight which has held some men back, the thing which kept them from doing great things and attaining great fame, has been just this: that they were not able to say or to write what they have thought and felt. And, indeed, a great poet is nothing more than the one man in a million who has the gift to express that which has been in the mind and heart of multitudes. If even the most commonplace of human beings could write all the poetry he has felt, he would produce something that would go straight to the hearts of many. ”

“ Haguna laughed, a low musical laugh, yet with an indescribable impersonality in it,—as if a spring brook had just then leaped over a little hill, and were laughing mockingly to itself at its exploit.
"They are souls," she said.
"Dear me!" exclaimed Anthrops; "are souls no bigger than that?"
"How do you know how large they are?" laughed Haguna, beginning to weave her hair into a curiously intricate braid. "These are but the vital germs of souls; but I hold them bound as surely by imprisoning these."
"But surely every soul is not so weak; all cannot be so cruelly imprisoned." ”

“ Eternal shame to those who make use of any authority to force the secrets of a generous heart, cutting off from it every alternative but that of a loathed deceit, or still more hateful, and scarcely less guilty, betrayal!
Aurore now found herself in the hands of a woman of the people, ennobled for a time by beauty and a true affection, but sinking, her good inspiration gone, into the bitterest ill-temper and most vulgar uncharity. ”

“ How can a poor parson write an eloquent or spirited sermon when his mind all the while is running upon the thought how he is to pay the baker or how he is to get shoes for his children? It will be but a dull discourse which, under that weight, will be produced even by a man who, favorably placed, could have done very considerable things. It is only a great genius here and there who can do great things, who can do his best, no matter at what disadvantage he may be placed; the great mass of ordinary men can make little headway with wind and tide dead against them. ”

“ Anthrops gazed long into the still, cruel depths of the river, held spell-bound by a horrible fascination; at last he raised his head, and, drawing a long sigh of relief, exclaimed,—
"Thank fortune, Haguna is no water-nix!"
"What!" cried the angry philosopher, "your mind still running upon that silly witch? Can you learn no wisdom from the fate of other generations of fools, but must yourself add another to the catalogue? She is more dangerous than the nixes: the snares which they laid for their victims were cobwebs, compared to the one she is weaving for you. You admire her hair, forsooth! ”

“ Floats the charmed soul forever."
As she finished the song, she arose, and threw over the youth the web of her fatal hair. The charmed song had so incorporated itself with the odorous air of the cavern, that every breath he drew seemed to be laden with the subtle music. It oppressed, stifled him; he strove in vain to escape its influence; and as he felt the soft hair brush his cheek, he swooned upon the ground.
The philosopher's study was a very different place from the green wood,—perched up, as it was, on the summit of a bare, bleak mountain. ”

“ The hot blood rushed into Haguna's face, as she exclaimed, with intense eagerness,—
"Is it my fault that I am a girl? I come to you to learn, to satisfy the insatiable thirst for knowledge which you have awakened,—and you reproach me with my ignorance! I have just discovered that the one thing I have secretly needed always was to learn to exercise my mind cramped with inaction, to share with you labor and toil."
"Poor child," sighed the philosopher, excited to sudden pity by her ardor, "you know little of the sweat of brain-toil! ”

“ In society he was a converser of extraordinary brilliancy. Few men were his rivals in this art, so well practised in Paris. His flow of ideas was not more remarkable than the choiceness and vigor of his expression. But he was not a tyrant in talk, and he was as ready to listen as to seek for listeners. His social powers were at the service of his friends. He was not of a gay temper, but he had a peculiar thoughtfulness for others which gave a charm to his manners far superior to that of careless vivacity. ”

“ As a novel, it is out of fashion,—for novels have fashion; as a development of the individuality of passion, it has perhaps no equal. Be sure that Aurore saw in it its fullest significance. It was strange reading for the disciple of the convent, but she had laid her bold hand upon the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil. She was not to be saved like a woman, through ignorance, but like a man, through the wisdom which has its heavenly and its earthly side. ”

“ There are men who carry weight in an uncomfortable house: in smoky chimneys: in a study with a dismal look-out: in distance from a railway-station: in ten miles between them and a bookseller's shop. Give another hundred a year of income, and the poor struggling parson who preaches dull sermons will astonish you by the talent he will exhibit when his mind is freed from the dismal depressing influence of ceaseless scheming to keep the wolf from the door. Let the poor little sick child grow strong and well, and with how much better heart will its father face the work of life! ”

“ But to love that is born of ideality, of intellectual sympathy, of harmonies of the spiritual and Immortal nature, of the very poetry and purity of the soul, if it be placed where reason and religion forbid its exercise and expression, what refuge but the grave,—what hope but that wide eternity where all human barriers fall, all human relations end, and love ceases to be a crime? A man of the world may struggle by change of scene, place, and employment. ”

“ Nor would she allow any World's Congress of morals to settle the delicate limits between these opposing vital forces, between what we owe to ourselves and what we owe to others. If there be a divine of passion for which it is noble to suffer and sacrifice, there is also a deeper divine of duty, far transcending the other both in sacrifice and in reward. To this divine, too often obscured to all of us, her later life increasingly renders homage; and to its gentle redemption, our loving, pitying hearts—the more loving, the more pitying for her story—are glad to leave her. ”

“ The true, magnanimous, patriotic spirit of subordination is not more necessary to military achievement than it is to the personal composure and the trustworthiness of nerve of the individual soldier. A strong desire and fixed habit of obedience to command relieve a man of all internal conflict between self-will and circumstance, and give him possession of his full powers of action and endurance. If absolute reliance on authority is a necessity to the great majority of mankind, (which it is,) it is to the few wisest and strongest a keen enjoyment when they can righteously indulge in it ”

“ Was it the disease of her injured brain that made all things alive to her,—that made her watch, in her ignorant way, the grave hills, the flashing, victorious rivers, look pitifully into the face of some dingy mushroom trodden in the mud before it scarce had lived, just as we should look into human faces to know what they would say to us? Was it the weakness and ignorance that made everything she saw or touched nearer, more human to her than to you or me? She never got used to living as other people do ”

“ And the music still kept spinning and spinning, and finally wove in the color and fragrance and light with its subtile self; and the background of the woof was the hum and murmur of voices, and the continual rustling of feet. No wonder the poor moths were ensnared in such bewilderment!
Do you pity the captives? But it is a delicious imprisonment, and its fullest delights cannot be realized except by prisoners. In the vast halls of Intellect and Reason one may indeed be master, marching (a little chilled perhaps) with firm step and head erect. ”

“ But it is a sorrowful fact, that the drag-weight of human beings not unfrequently consists of things which make us angry rather than sympathetic. You have seen a man carrying heavy weight in life, perhaps in the form of inveterate wrong-headedness and suspiciousness; but instead of pitying him, our impulse would rather be to beat him upon that perverted head. We pity physical malformation or unhealthiness; but our bent is to be angry with intellectual and moral malformation or unhealthiness. We feel for the deformed man, who must struggle on at that sad disadvantage ”

“ Oh, the eager hope and sickening disappointment, the vehement aspirations, the intense longings, the bitter hatred, the scorn, the greater than angelic, the human love and benevolence, the fortitude, the courage, the whole strange life of hundreds of dead men, that burned between those thick covers! Often books do not reveal their authors until many years after their death. They are read at first for the mite of fuel that they bring to some blazing controversy; the man is entirely forgotten in his work. ”

“ All this and more must he dare who aspires to the lofty service of philosophy."
"All this and more would I gladly suffer," cried Haguna. "There is a fire now in my brain; you have kindled it, and it must be fed. And, moreover, I wish to endure this trial for its own sake; for it is not fitting that men should suffer more than women. Perhaps, too,—am I presumptuous in thinking so?—two workers may so lessen the toil of one that this lonely trial maybe greatly helped by even my assistance." ”

“ And upon the interlacing greenery of the shrubbery, and the lichens upon the trees, and the soft moss covering with jealous tenderness the bare places in the ground, the slant sunbeams glittered in the early morning dew. As Anthrops rode along silently by the side of Haguna, an inexpressible joyfulness filled his heart; the light, round, white clouds nestling in the deep bosom of the sky, the faint, delicious odor of the woods, the rustling, murmuring presence that forever dwelt there, all made him unspeakably glad and light-hearted. ”

“ You need to know your engine's temper before driving it, just as much as you need to know that of your horse, or that of your friend. I know, of course, there is a mechanical reason for this seeming caprice, if you could trace the reason. But not one man in a thousand could trace out the reason. And the phenomenon, as it presses itself upon us, really amounts to this: that very complicated machinery appears to have a will of its own,—appears to exercise something of the nature of choice. But there is no machine so capricious as the human mind. ”

“ Everything must be squared according to an inexorable plan; self must be despised, passions restrained and clarified, till the life becomes thin and attenuated through careful discipline,—all hopes and fears laid aside till the soul becomes accustomed to its chilly atmosphere. Then body and mind must be trained to endure a fearful weariness, to pass the days under such a stern pressure of toil that all loving, graceful interests shall be rooted out of the stony soil. ”

“ We do not doubt that her zeal for human progress, her sympathy for the wrongs of the race, and her distrust of existing institutions were deep and sincere. We do not doubt that she was devoted in friendship, disinterested in love, ardent in philanthropy. She has seen the poverty and insincerity of society; she has quarrelled with what she calls the shams of sacred things, the merely conventional marriage, the God of bigotry and hypocrisy, the government of oppression and fraud ”

“ Yet it is imaginable, even to an undepraved mind, that a woman might sometimes like to be on the other side of the fence, to view the mad bull of publicity in its own pasture, and feel that it cannot gore her. Poor George! running about in the little boots, and wearing a great ugly coat and woollen choker,—it was not through vanity that you did this. Strange sights you must have seen in Paris!—none, perhaps, stranger than yourself! The would-be nun of the English convent walking the streets in male attire, and even, as you tell us, with your hands in your pockets! ”

“ Rarely have I enjoyed the hours more than when roaming from cellar to garret these tenantless houses. A deserted dwelling! How the imagination is fascinated by what may have there transpired of human joy or sorrow,—the solitary struggles of the soul for better things, the dawn and the fruition of love, the separations and reunions of families, the hearth-stone consecrated by affection and prayer, the bridal throng, the birth of new lives, the farewells to the world, the funeral train. ”