Various

“ Am I a warrior of the Lord, and do I shrink from the toils of the camp, and long for the ease of the court before I have earned it? Why do we clamor for happiness? Why should we sinners be happy? And yet, O God, why is the world made so lovely as it lies there, why so rejoicing, and so girt with splendor and beauty, if we are never to enjoy it? If penance and toil were all we were sent here for, why not make a world grim and desolate as this around me?—then there would be nothing to seduce us. But our path is a constant fight; Nature is made only to be resisted ”

“ He is the man full of strong thought backed by civilization: they, the men trying to keep up their faith in idols, trying to scare with war-paint, trying to startle with war-whoop, trying to vex with showers of poor Aztec arrows.
Jefferson was an orator,—not in that he fed petty assemblages with narcotic words to stupefy conscience, or corrosive words to kill conscience, but in that he gave to the world those decisive, true words which shall yet pierce all tyranny and slavery. ”

“ Jefferson was the founder of a democratic system, strong and full-orbed: “leading men” have fastened his name to an aristocratic system with mobocratic cries.
This great tree of Liberty which we are all trying to plant will, of course, not grow as we will, but as God and Nature will. Some branches will be exuberant through too great wealth of sunshine,—others gnarled and awry through too great fury of storms. We need find no fault with any growth, but we may admire some branches and prize some fruits more than others. ”

“ The mill,—even now, with the vague dread of some uncertain evil to come, the mill absorbed all fear in its old hated shadow. Whatever danger was coming to them lay in it, came from it, she knew, in her confused, blurred way of thinking. It loomed up now, with the square patch of ashen sky above, black, heavy with years of remembered agony and loss. In Lois’s hopeful, warm life this was the one uncomprehended monster. Her crushed brain, her unwakened powers, resented their wrong dimly to the mass of iron and work and impure smells, unconscious of any remorseless power that wielded it. ”

“ From the point of sensuous experience, seen from the streets and markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the estimate of age is low, melancholy, and skeptical. Frankly face the facts, and see the result. Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time. This cup, which Nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science: especially, it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself. ”

“ Cooper’s character as a man is the more admirable to us because it was marked by strong points which are not common in our country, and which the institutions of our country do not foster. He had the courage to defy the majority: he had the courage to confront the press: and not from the sting of ill-success, not from mortified vanity, not from wounded self-love, but from an heroic sense of duty. How easy a life might he have purchased by the cheap virtues of silence, submission, and acquiescence! ”

“ The west front is unspeakably grand, and may be read over and over again forever, and still show undetected meanings, like a great, broad page of marvellous writing in black-letter,—so many sculptured ornaments there are, blossoming out before your eyes, and gray statues that have grown there since you looked last, and empty niches, and a hundred airy canopies beneath which carved images used to be, and where they will show themselves again, if you gaze long enough.—But I will not say another word about the Cathedral. ”

“ As a private person, writing for man as man, Jefferson forgot readily enough all differences of nation. He wrote as readily and fully of the hideousness of slavery to Meusnier and Warville in France, or to Price and Priestley in England, as to any of his neighbors; but, as public servant of the nation, writing to Hammond or Viar, representatives of foreign powers, he made no apology for our miseries. England might be ready enough to act the part of Dives, but Jefferson was not the statesman to put America in the attitude of Lazarus,—begging, and showing sores. ”

“ We do not count a man’s years, until he has nothing else to count. The vast inconvenience of animal immortality was told in the fable of Tithonus. In short, the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but immensely disadvantageous. Life is well enough, but we shall all be glad to get out of it, and they will all be glad to have us. ”

“ Cooper was fortunate in having been born with a vigorous constitution, and in having kept through life the blessing of robust health. He never suffered from remorse of the stomach or protest of the brain; and his writings are those of a man who always digested his dinner and never had a headache. His novels, like those of Scott, are full of the breeze and sunshine of health. They breathe of manly tastes, active habits, sound sleep, a relish for simple pleasures, temperate enjoyments, and the retention in manhood of the fresh susceptibilities of youth. ”

“ The real secret of this power was, first of all, that Jefferson saw infinitely deeper into the principles of the rising Democracy, and infinitely farther into its future working, than any other man of his time. Those who earnestly read him will often halt astounded at proofs of a foresight in him almost miraculous. Even in masses of what men have called his puerility there are often germs of immense worth,—taking years, perhaps, to show life, but sure to be alive at last. ”

“ Most of the train was occupied by a battalion of sharp-shooters, but in the rear car the General and his staff found seats. The day was cloudy and damp; there was no one to say farewell; and as the train passed through the cold hills, a feeling of gloom seemed to pervade the company. Nature was in harmony with the clouded fortunes of our General, and the laboring locomotive dragged us at a snail’s pace, as if it were unwilling to assist us in our adventure. ”

“ To such Jefferson seems a grandmotherly sort of person,—riding about in a gig arranged to register the length of his rides,—walking about in boots arranged to register the length of his walks,—weatherwise, and profound in dealing with smoky chimneys and sheep-breeding.
But whether men have cavilled at him for a dreamer or laughed at him for a tinker, they have been mainly foolish, for they have cavilled and laughed at the very combination which made him powerful. In no other American have been so happily blended highest skill in theory and highest strength in practice. ”

“ Indeed, this whole novel is full of the finest expressions of the author’s genius. Into none of his works has he put more of the warmth of personal feeling and the glow of early recollection. His own heart beats through every line. The fresh breezes of the morning of life play round its pages, and its unexhaled dew hangs upon them. It is colored throughout with the rich hues of sympathetic emotion. All that is attractive in pioneer life is reproduced with substantial truth ”

“ Jefferson, then, known of all men not fettered by provincial traditions as invested with this foresight and this faith, is become to a vast party an idol, and from his writings issue oracles. But the priests at his shrines, having waxed fat in honors, have at last so befogged his sentiments and wrested his arguments, that thousands of true men regard him sorrowfully as the promoter of that Slavery-Despotism which to-day blooms in treason. It is worth our while, therefore, to seek to know whether Jefferson the god of the Oligarchs is Jefferson the Democrat. ”

“ But over Cooper’s pages his readers never yawn. They never break down in the middle of one of his stories. The fortunes of his characters are followed with breathless and accumulating interest to the end. In vain does the dinner-bell sound, or the clock strike the hour of bed-time: the book cannot be laid down till we know whether Elizabeth Temple is to get out of the woods without being burned alive, or solve the mystery that hangs over the life of Jacopo Frontoni. He has in ample measure that paramount and essential merit in a novelist of fertility of invention. ”

“ Whilst we yet call ourselves young, and all our mates are yet youths and boyish, one good fellow in the set prematurely sports a gray or a bald head, which does not impose on us who know how innocent of sanctity or of Platonism he is, but does not less deceive his juniors and the public, who presently distinguish him with a most amusing respect: and this lets us into the secret, that the venerable forms that so awed our childhood were just such impostors. Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then a young heart beating under fourscore winters. ”

“ The eye wanders from one black, shapeless mass to another, and there is ever the same suggestion of hideous monster life,—of goblin convulsions and strange fiend-like agonies in some age gone by. One’s very footsteps have an unnatural, metallic clink, and one’s garments brushing over the rough surface are torn and fretted by its sharp, remorseless touch,—as if its very nature were so pitiless and acrid that the slightest contact revealed it. ”

“ Place and people look lazy, vicious, and ashamed. I suppose those chimneys are my Foundry. The smoke rises as if the furnaces were ill-fed and weak in the lungs. Nothing, I can see, looks alive, except that queer little steamboat coming in,—the ‘I. Ambuster,’—jolly name for a boat!”
Wade left his traps at the station, and walked through the village. All the gilding of a golden sunset of June could not make it anything but commonplace. It would be forlorn on a gray day, and utterly dismal in a storm. ”

“ If a body brings up a girl one way, why, every fellow is after her, and one has no peace; and if a body brings her up another way, she gets her head in the clouds, and there’s no good of her in this world. Now look at that girl,—doesn’t everybody say it’s time she were married?—but no marrying for her! Nothing will do but we must off to Rome on a pilgrimage,—and what’s the good of that, I want to know? If it’s praying that’s to be done, the dear saints know she’s at it from morning till night,—and lately she’s up and down three or four times a night with some prayer or other. ”

“ She did not know that it is the color of shams, and that women like this are the most deadly of shams. As the phaëton went slowly down, Margaret came nearer, meeting it on the road-side, the dust from the wheels stifling the air. Lois saw her look up, and then suddenly stand still, holding to the fence, as they met her. Holmes’s cold, wandering eye turned on the little dusty figure standing there, poor and despised. Polston called his eyes hungry: it was a savage hunger that sprang into them now; a gray shadow creeping over his set face, as he looked at her, in that flashing moment. ”

“ There are long corridors, an intricate arrangement of passages, and an up-and-down meandering of staircases, amid which it would be no marvel to encounter some forgotten guest who had gone astray a hundred years ago, and was still seeking for his bed-room while the rest of his generation were in their graves. There is no exaggerating the confusion of mind that seizes upon a stranger in the bewildering geography of a great old-fashioned English inn. ”

“ Now and then there would come up from the very entrails of the mountain a sort of convulsed sob of hollow sound, and the earth would quiver beneath his feet, and fragments from the surrounding rocks would scale off and fall with crashing reverberations into the depth beneath; at such moments it would seem as if the very mountain were about to crush in and bear him down in its ruins.
Father Francesco, though blinded by the smoke and choked by the vapor, could not be content without descending into the abyss and exploring the very penetralia of its mysteries. ”

“ This celestial lightness, which constitutes the last praise and causes the purest benefit of books, comes not of any manner of writing; no mere vivacity, though that of a French writer of memoirs, though that of Arsène Houssaye himself, can compass it; by no knack or talents is it to be attained. Perfect style has, indeed, many allurements, and is of exceeding price; but it is no chariot of Elijah, nevertheless. Was ever style more delightful, of its kind, than Dryden’s? Was ever style more heavy and monotonous than that of Swedenborg in his theological works? ”

“ To skate Fine Art, you must have a Body and a Soul, each of the First Order; otherwise you will never get out of coarse art and skating in one syllable. So much for yourself, the motive power. And your machinery,—your smooth-bottomed rockers, the same shape stem and stern,—this must be as perfect as the man it moves, and who moves it. ”

“ Presently the horses are tied along the fences, riders are lounging under the trees, the kitchen-fires are lighted, guardsmen are scattered along the banks of the stream bathing, the wagons roll heavily over the prairie and are drawn up along the edge of the wood, tents are raised, tent-furniture is hastily arranged, and the camp looks as if it had been there a month. Before dark a regiment of infantry and two batteries of artillery come up. The men sleep in the open air without tents, and innumerable fires cover the hill-sides. ”

“ That which does not decay is so central and controlling in us, that, as long as one is alone by himself, he is not sensible of the inroads of time, which always begin at the surface-edges. If, on a winter day, you should stand within a bell-glass, the face and color of the afternoon clouds would not indicate whether it were June or January; and if we did not find the reflection of ourselves in the eyes of the young people, we could not know that the century-clock had struck seventy instead of twenty. ”

“ Ursula Malbone is a finer girl than Cecilia Howard, or even Elizabeth Temple. So when he has occasion to delineate a woman who, from her position in life, or the peculiar circumstances into which she is thrown, is moved by deeper springs of feeling, is obliged to put forth sterner energies, than are known to females reared in the sheltered air of prosperity and civilization,—when he paints the heart of woman roused by great perils, overborne by heavy sorrows, wasted by strong passions,—we recognize the same master-hand which has given us such powerful pictures of character in the other sex. ”

“ Agnes had never read romances, it is true, but she had been brought up on the legends of the saints, and there never was a marvel possible to human conception that had not been told there. Princes had come from China and Barbary and Abyssinia and every other strange out-of-the-way place, to kneel at the feet of fair, obdurate saints who would not even turn the head to look at them; but she had acted, she was conscious, after a much more mortal fashion, and so made herself work for confession and penance. ”

“ This union of fervent thought and cool action has, of course, brought upon Jefferson the invectives of two great classes. One class have looked merely at his thinking, and have distrusted him as a dreamer. To these he is a dealer in oracles, at second-hand, from Voltaire and Diderot. The other class have studied his plans of practical philanthropy, with all his shrewd researches and homely discussions in agriculture, finance, mechanics, and architecture, and have ridiculed him as a tinker. ”

“ The technical skill, the poetical feeling, the rapidity of the narrative, the distinctness of the details, the vividness of the coloring, the life, power, and animation which breathe and burn in every line, make up a combination of the highest order of literary merit. It is as good a sea-piece as the best of Turner’s; and we cannot give it higher praise. We hear the whistling of the wind through the rigging, and the roar of the pitiless sea, bellowing for its prey ”

“ Substance, however, is to be widely distinguished from ponderability. Oxygen is not so ponderous as lead or granite, but it is far more substantial than either, and, as every one knows, infinitely more serviceable to life. The distinction is equally valid when applied to books and to men. The “airy nothings” of imagination prove to be the most enduring somethings of the world’s literature; and the last lightness of heart may go with the purest truth of soul and the most precious virtue of intelligence. All expressions carry the perpetual savors of their origin ”

“ His genius, which sometimes moves with “compulsion and laborious flight” when dealing with artificial life and the manners and speech of cultivated men, and women, here recovers all its powers, and sweeps and soars with victorious and irresistible wing. The breeze from the sea, the fresh air and wide horizon of the prairies, the noonday darkness of the forest are sure to animate his drooping energies, and breathe into his mind the inspiration of a fresh life. ”

“ He pronounced this cabalistic word with such magic power that all the air seemed instantly filled with a cheerful flight of gold American eagles, each carrying a double eagle on its back and a silver dollar in its claws; and all the soil of America seemed to sprout with coin, as after a shower a meadow sprouts with the yellow buds of the dandelion.
“Money! yes, Money!” murmured the Directors.
It seemed a word of good omen, now.
“The second thing,” resumed the newcomer, “is a Man!”
The Directors looked at each other and did not see such a being. ”

“ Cooper’s moral nature was thoroughly sound, and all his moral instincts were right. His writings show in how high regard he held the two great guardian virtues of courage in man and purity in woman. In all his novels we do not recall a single expression of doubtful morality. He never undertakes to enlist our sympathies on the wrong side. If his good characters are not always engaging, he never does violence to virtue by presenting attractive qualities in combination with vices which in real life harden the heart and coarsen the taste. ”