Various

“ Not much better is the excuse alleged in the social and genial influences of tobacco. It certainly seems a singular way of opening the lips for conversation by closing them on a pipe-stem, and it would rather appear as if Fate designed to gag the smokers and let the non-smokers talk. But supposing it otherwise, does it not mark a condition of extreme juvenility in our social development, if no resources of intellect can enable a half-dozen intelligent men to be agreeable to each other, without applying the forcing process, by turning the room into an imperfectly organized chimney? ”

“ Not a man in the House has his wits more thoroughly about him. Ever ready to extricate his colleagues from an awkward difficulty, to evade a dangerous question,—making, with an air of transparent candor, a reply in which nothing is answered,—to disarm an angry opponent with a few conciliatory or complimentary words, or to demolish him with a little good-humored raillery which sets the House in a roar; equally skilful in attack and retreat: such, in a word, is the bearing of this gay and gallant veteran, from the beginning to the end of each debate, during the entire session of Parliament. ”

“ I meant only to ask you, How can I help it, if the people in my story seem coarse to you,—if the hero, unlike all other heroes, stopped to count the cost before he fell in love,—if it made his fingers thrill with pleasure to touch a full pocket-book as well as his mistress's hand,—not being withal, this Stephen Holmes, a man to be despised? A hero, rather, of a peculiar type,—a man, more than other men: the very mould of man, doubt it who will, that women love longest and most madly. ”

“ It works slowly, Holmes. In six thousand years, taking humanity as one, this self-existent soul should have clothed itself with a freer, royaller garment than poor Lois's body,—or mine," he added, bitterly.
"It works slowly," said the other, quietly. "Faster soon, in America.
There are yet many ills of life for the divinity within to conquer."
"And Lois and the swarming mass yonder in those dens? It is late for them to begin the fight?"
"Endurance is enough for them here. Their religions teach them that they could not bear the truth. ”

“ And then her grandmother——No, there was no possibility.
Meanwhile Agnes's good old uncle sat in the orange-shaded garden, busily perfecting his sketches; but his mind was distracted, and his thoughts wandered,—and often he rose, and, leaving his drawings, would pace up and down the little place, absorbed in earnest prayer. The thought of his master's position was hourly growing upon him. The real world with its hungry and angry tide was each hour washing higher and higher up on the airy shore of the ideal, and bearing the pearls and enchanted shells of fancy out into its salt and muddy waters. ”

“ Not only is it national life and a foremost place among nations that is at stake, but the vital principle of Law itself, the august foundation on which the very possibility of government, above all of self-government, rests as in the hollow of God's own hand. If democracy shall prove itself capable of having raised twenty millions of people to a level of thought where they can appreciate this cardinal truth, and can believe no sacrifice too great for its defence and establishment, then democracy will have vindicated itself beyond all chance of future cavil. ”

“ Perhaps the first thing about him which impresses an American, accustomed at home to dyspeptic politicians and statesmen prematurely old, is his physical activity. Fancy a man of seventy-six, who has been in most incessant political life for more than fifty years, sitting out a debate of ten hours without flinching, and then walking to his house in Piccadilly, not less than two miles. And his body is not more active than his mind. He does something more than sit out a debate. Not a word escapes him when a prominent man is on his legs. ”

“ But he planned no murders, designed no house-burnings; to those who, under solemn pledge of secrecy, joined him, he propounded a single idea. It was this. If we, the negroes, who are as five to one, compared to the white men, refuse to work any more until freedom is given, we shall have it. There will be some resistance, and a few of us will be killed; but that we must expect. This, in substance, was the ground taken by Sharpe, who, as a slave, had always been a favorite both with his master and others. This was the commencement of the great insurrection. ”

“ I never saw a full-blooded saint or sinner in my life. The coldest villain I ever knew was the only son of his mother, and she a widow,—and a kinder son never lived. I have known people capable of a love terrible in its strength; but I never knew such a case that some one did not consider its expediency as "a match" in the light of dollars and cents. As for heroines, of course I know beautiful women, and good as fair. The most beautiful is delicate and pure enough for a type of the Madonna, and has a heart almost as warm and holy as hers who was blessed among women. ”

“ Not an eye wanders from the speaker, and the attention which he commands is of the kind paid in the House only to merit and ability of the highest order. And, certainly, the orator is not unworthy of this silent, but most respectful tribute to his talents. His manner is earnest and animated, his enunciation is beautifully clear and distinct, the tones of his voice are singularly pleasing and persuasive, stealing their way into the hearts of men, and charming them into assent to his propositions. ”

“ One effect of this uprising of the slaves was, in England, to deepen the impression of the evils of the system under which they were held. If the mere discussion of Slavery were fraught with such terrible consequences, how could safety ever consist with the thing itself? By discussion they had but exercised their own rights as Englishmen. Of what use to them was Magna Charta, if they must seal their lips in silence when a public abuse required to be corrected, a gigantic wrong to be righted? ”

“ If any one of my readers had been in the Speaker's Gallery on that evening, his attention would have been arrested by a member on the Ministerial benches, a little to the right of Lord Palmerston. His face is the most striking in the House,—grave, thoughtful, almost stern, but lighting up with wonderful beauty when he smiles. Usually, his air is rather abstracted,—not, indeed, the manner of one whose thoughts are wandering from the business under debate, but rather of one who is thinking deeply upon what is passing around him. ”

“ Tobacco may be "the anodyne of poverty," as somebody has said, but it certainly promotes poverty. This narcotic lulls to sleep all pecuniary economy. Every pipe may not, indeed, cost so much as that jewelled one seen by Dibdin in Vienna, which was valued at a thousand pounds; or even as the German meerschaum which was passed from mouth to mouth through a whole regiment of soldiers till it was colored to perfection, having never been allowed to cool,—a bill of one hundred pounds being ultimately rendered for the tobacco consumed. But how heedlessly men squander money on this pet luxury! ”

“ In those whose goodness, like that of Cecil Dreeme, is founded on purity of sentiment and strength of principle, he excites unmitigated abhorrence and strenuous opposition; but on all those whose excellence is "respectable" rather than vital, who are good by the felicity of their circumstances rather than the force of their conscience, he exercises a fascination almost irresistible. To everybody, indeed, who has in him any latent evil not overbalanced by the habitual performance of positive duties, Densdeth's companionship is morally blighting. ”

“ The British people were aroused. The great heart of the nation was beating in response to the appeals for justice and right which were made in their ears. The world can scarce furnish a parallel to this spectacle of moral sublimity. It was the voice of a people, calling, in tones that must be heard, for justice and freedom,—and that not for themselves, but for a distant, a defenceless race.
The publication of a circular inviting Anti-Slavery delegates to London, a movement made by the leaders of the cause, in its results took the most enthusiastic by surprise. ”

“ Our politics are no dirtier or more corrupt than those of our neighbors. The famous Quam parvâ sapientiâ regitur mundus was not said in scorn by the minister of a republic, but in sober sadness by one whose dealings had been lifelong with the courts and statesmen of princes. The real disgust lies in the selfish passions that are called into play by the strife of party and the small ambitions of public men, and not in any mere coarseness in the expression of them. We are not an elegant people: rather less so, on the whole, even in the aristocratic South than in the democratic North. ”

“ But Father Antonio was of himself wholly unable to come to such a courageous result, though capable of following to the death the master who should do it for him. His was the true artist nature, as unfit to deal with rough human forces as a bird that flies through the air is unfitted to a hand-to-hand grapple with the armed forces of the lower world. There is strength in these artist natures. Curious computations have been made of the immense muscular power that is brought into exercise when a swallow skims so smoothly through the blue sky ”

“ A clump of trees makes a fine leafy post-bedstead, and to awake in the morning amid a grove of sheltering nodding oaks is lung-inspiring. It was the good thought of a wanderer to say, "The forest is the poor man's jacket." Napoleon had a high opinion of the bivouac style of life, and on the score of health gave it the preference over tent-sleeping. Free circulation is a great blessing, albeit we think its eulogy rather strongly expressed by the Walden-Pondist, when he says, "I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion. ”

“ There's not much I know in life,—enough to madden me. But I do know there's something stronger,—some God outside of the mean devil they call 'Me.' You'll learn it, boy. There's an old story of a man like you and the rest of your sect, and of the vile, mean, crawling things that God sent to bring him down. There are such things yet. Mean passions in your divine soul, low, selfish things, that will get the better of you, show you what you are. You'll do all that man can do. But they are coming, Stephen Holmes! ”

“ The divinity, which is only a hedge about a king, becomes a wall of triple brass about a slaveholder.
But while we should prefer a more daring, or at least a more definite policy on the part of the Government, we do not think the time has come for turning the war into a crusade. The example of saints, martyrs, and heroes, who could disregard consequences because the consequences concerned only themselves and their own life, is for the private man, and not for the statesman who is responsible for the complex life of the commonwealth. ”

“ Florence will certainly be a refuge for him. But why do I put confidence in man? In the Lord alone have I righteousness and strength."
And the old monk raised the psalm, "Quare fremunt gentes," and his voice rose and fell through the flowery recesses and dripping grottoes of the old gorge, sad and earnest like the protest of the few and feeble of Christ's own against the rushing legions of the world. Yet, as he sang, courage and holy hope came into his soul from the sacred words,—just such courage as they afterwards brought to Luther, and to the Puritans in later times. ”

“ Is this, then, to be a commonplace war, a prosaic and peddling quarrel about Cotton? Shall there be nothing to enlist enthusiasm or kindle fanaticism? Are we to have no Cause like that for which our English republican ancestors died so gladly on the field, with such dignity on the scaffold?—no Cause that shall give us a hero, who knows but a Cromwell? To our minds, though it may be obscure to Englishmen who look on Lancashire as the centre of the universe, no army was ever enlisted for a nobler service than ours. ”

“ There are no conveniences for writing. A member who should attempt to read a manuscript speech would never get beyond the first sentence. Nor does anybody ever dream of writing out his address and committing it to memory. In fact, nothing can be more informal than their manner in debate. You see a member rising with his hat in one hand, and his gloves and cane in the other. It is as if he had just said to his neighbor, "I have taken a good deal of interest in the subject under discussion, and have been at some pains to understand it. I am inclined to tell the House what I think of it." ”

“ The people begin to show signs of impatience that the curtain should be so slow to rise and show them the great actor in our national tragedy. They are so used to having a gigantic bubble of notoriety blown for them in a week by the newspapers, though it burst in a day or two, leaving but a drop of muddy suds behind it, that they have almost learned to think the making of a great character as simple a matter as that of a great reputation. ”

“ Agnes had listened to it, and parted in friendship from Antonio. Now his old mother must be soothed and pacified; and Antonio must be made to persevere.
"What is a girl worth that can be won at the first asking?" quoth Elsie. "Depend upon it, she will fall to thinking of him, and the next time she sees him she will give him a good look. The girl never knew what it was to have a lover. No wonder she doesn't take to it at first; there's where her bringing up comes in, so different from other girls'. Courage, Elsie! Nature will speak in its own time." ”

“ Besides, the true artist has ever an enchanted island of his own; and when this world perplexes and wearies him, he can sail far away and lay his soul down to rest, as Cytherea bore the sleeping Ascanius far from the din of battle, to sleep on flowers and breathe the odor of a hundred undying altars to Beauty.
Therefore, after a restless night, the good monk arose in the first purple of the dawn, and instinctively betook him to a review of his drawings for the shrine, as a refuge from troubled thought. ”

“ In the hurry and confusion of a war, and amidst the pressure of hundreds of new cases in a day, what can the surgeons of the hospital be expected to do for science, or even for the improvement of medical and surgical practice?—The answer is seen in the new arrangements in England, where a statistical branch has been established in the Army Medical Department. Of course, no one but the practising surgeon or physician can furnish the pathological facts in each individual case; but this is what every active and earnest practitioner does always and everywhere, when he sees reason for it. ”

“ There is something instructive in the fate of that mob of enthusiasts who followed the banner of Walter the Penniless, a name of evil omen. It saves trouble to say that we must fight the Devil with fire; though, when the Devil is incarnate in human beings, that policy has never been very successful at Smithfield or elsewhere. But in trying the fiery cure of a servile insurrection, we should run the risk of converting the whole white population of the South into devils of the most desperate sort, with whom any kind of reconciliation, even truce, would be impossible. ”

“ We mean that the physician, whose humanity and intelligence are broad diplomas, on presenting which the doors of hearts and houses open with a welcome, enters into the choicest field of his education and research, where his tender observation walks the wards of thought, feeling, and motive, to amass the facts of health and suffering, to be refined at the true drama of pathos, to be ennobled by the spectacle of fair and lofty spiritual traits, to be advised of the weaknesses which he learns to touch lightly with his caustic, while his knowing and friendly look deprecates all excess of pain. ”