Various

“ In whatever mode that end may be brought out, and through whatever struggles America may yet be doomed to pass, we are assured that only one termination can await a conflict between a nation which has abjured its complicity with crime and a confederation which exists but to perpetuate that crime forever. It is not now, in the presence of the events of the last three years, that we shall be tempted to fear that Wrong and Robbery, and the systematic degradation of woman, may possibly prove to be principles of stability, capable of producing the security and consolidation of a commonwealth! ”

“ Resignation would need to be cultivated by human beings; for all round us there is a multitude of things very different from what we would wish. Not in your house, not in your family, not in your street, not in your parish, not in your country, and least of all in yourself, can you have things as you would wish. And you have your choice of two alternatives. You must either fret yourself into a nervous fever, or you must cultivate the habit of Resignation. And very often Resignation does not mean that you are at all reconciled to a thing, but just that you feel you can do nothing to mend it. ”

“ Was it to be wondered at, that at the time when the happiest life was presented to his view, when it was arranged that he was to marry a young person of beauty and fortune, when the little knot of friends who valued him saw such a future for the beloved poet, and he himself, with generous, unselfish feelings, looked forward to it more delighted on their account,—was it to be wondered at, that, on the appearance of consumption, his ardent mind should have sunk into despair? ”

“ The history of Sojourner Truth worked in his mind and led him into the deeper recesses of the African nature,—those unexplored depths of being and feeling, mighty and dark as the gigantic depths of tropical forests, mysterious as the hidden rivers and mines of that burning continent whose life-history is yet to be. A few days after, he told me that he had conceived the idea of a statue which he should call the Libyan Sibyl. Two years subsequently, I revisited Rome, and found the gorgeous Cleopatra finished, a thing to marvel at, as the creation of a new style of beauty, a new manner of art. ”

“ But such beauty is made, not born. Care and weariness and despondency come of themselves, and groove their own furrows. Hope and intelligence and interest and buoyancy must be wooed for their gentle and genial touch. A mother must battle against the tendencies that drag her downward. She must take pains to grow, or she will not grow. She must sedulously cultivate her mind and heart, or her old age will be ungraceful; and if she lose freshness without acquiring ripeness, she is indeed in an evil case. ”

“ The sickly, sallow, sorrowful little ones, shadowed too early by life's cares, are something other than a blessing. When Cornelia finds her children too many for her, when her step trembles and her cheek fades, when the sparkle flats out of her wine of life and her salt has lost its savor, her jewels are Tarpeian jewels. One child educated by healthy and happy parents is better than seven dragging their mother into the grave, notwithstanding the unmeasured reprobation of our little book. ”

“ There is sometimes an advantage in not being a notable person; at all events, I thought so, when I saw the Prowleys and their guests of chief consideration, to wit, the clergyman, deacon, and Miss Hurribattle, accommodated on the first row of chairs, with their faces under grand illumination by two camphene-lamps upon the Doctor's table. There they sat, together with Mrs. Hunesley from New York, two or three distinguished visitors from the hotel, and the elders of Foxden, looking wistfully at the bones, as if in envy of their fleshless condition that sultry August evening. ”

“ At once you grow transcendental, and suppose that some German vine-dresser in Catawba-land—by the way, Gerritt Smith's gardener is a nephew of Schiller!—was dreaming of the marriage of the Sun with the Vine, his darling plant, in whose juice linger and sparkle the light and joy of many faded days. But no, it was named from a real Golden Wedding.
Let me take you—as the clairvoyants say—to a large, sooty, toiling city in the West. From street to street you shall go, and see but little to excite your admiration, unless you are a constant believer that work is worship. ”

“ It is of no manner of consequence how a child is clad, provided only its health be not injured, its taste corrupted, or its self-respect wounded. Children look prettier in the cheapest and simplest materials than in the richest and most elaborate. But how common is it to see the children gayly caparisoned in silk and feathers and flounces, while the mother is enveloped in an atmosphere of cottony fadiness! One would take the child to be mistress and the mother a servant. ”

“ They can but leave their mark upon it, and the mark of good is good. Pity does not have the same finger-touch as revenge. Love does not hold the same brush as hatred. Sympathy and gratitude and benevolence have a different sign-manual from cruelty and carelessness and deceit. All these busy little sprites draw their fine lines, lay on their fine colors; the face lights up under their tiny hands; the prisoned soul shines clearer and clearer through, and there is the consecration and the poet's dream. ”

“ The only enjoyment, the only use to be attained in this world, must be attained on the wing. Each day brings its own happiness, its own benefit; but it has none to spare. What escapes to-day is escaped forever. To-morrow has no overflow to atone for the lost yesterdays.
Few things are more painful to look upon than the self-renunciation, the self-abnegation of mothers,—painful both for its testimony and its prophecy. Its testimony is of over-care, over-work, over-weariness, the abuse of capacities that were bestowed for most sacred uses, an utter waste of most pure and life-giving waters. ”

“ If people are stubborn and rebellious, stiff-necked and uncircumcised, in heart and ears, the fewer of them the better. A small population, trained to honor and virtue, to liberality of culture and breadth of view, to self-reliance and self-respect, is a thousand times better than an overcrowded one with everything at loose ends. As with the village, so with the family. There ought to be no more children than can be healthily and thoroughly reared, as regards the moral, physical, and intellectual nature both of themselves and their parents. All beyond this is wrong and disastrous. ”

“ To me it seems that to look on the first land that was ever lifted above the waste of waters, to follow the shore where the earliest animals and plants were created when the thought of God first expressed itself in organic forms, to hold in one's hand a bit of stone from an old sea-beach, hardened into rock thousands of centuries ago, and studded with the beings that once crept upon its surface or were stranded there by some retreating wave, is even of deeper interest to men than the relics of their own race, for these things tell more directly of the thoughts and creative acts of God. ”

“ The wine-makers maintain, that wine, though long confined in bottles, sympathizes still with the vines from which it was pressed; and when the season of the flowering of vines comes, it is always agitated anew. Surely the Catawba must ever sparkle afresh, when in it, as now, we pledge the memory of the brave and wise pioneer whose life climbed to its maturity along with the purple clusters which so had garnered the frost and sunshine of a life as well as of the seasons.
THE SILURIAN BEACH. With what interest do we look upon any relic of early human history! ”

“ But the expression of such admiration and sympathy from the truest hearts among us has been almost silenced by the solemn joy wherewith we have beheld your country purging herself, even through seas of blood, for her guilty participation in the crimes of the past, and preparing for herself the stainless future of 'a land wherein dwelleth righteousness.' We have rejoiced in the midst of sorrow to know that the doom of Slavery was written by a Divine Hand, even from the hour when its upholders dared to believe it possible in the face of Heaven to build up a State upon an injustice. ”

“ You ought to counsel them to bear with Christian resignation what they cannot help; but you ought with equal fervor to counsel them to look around and see if there are not many things which they can help, and if there are, by all means to help them. What is inevitable comes to us from God, no matter how many hands it passes through; but submission to unnecessary evils is cowardice or laziness; and extolling of the evil as good is sheer ignorance, or perversity, or servility. Even the ills that must be borne should be borne under protest, lest patience degenerate into slavery. ”

“ People do not always tell lies, when they are telling what is not the truth; but falsehood is still disastrous. Men and women think they believe a thousand things which they do not believe; but as long as they think so, it is just as bad as if it were so. Men talk—and women listen and echo—about the overpowering loveliness and charm of a young mother surrounded by her blooming family, ministering to their wants and absorbed in their welfare, self-denying and self-forgetful ”

“ People may adopt a course of conduct which you do not approve; yet you may feel it your duty to make no open animadversion. Circumstances may have suggested such a course to them, or forced it upon them; and perhaps, considering all things, it is the best they can do. But when, encouraged by your silence, they publish it to the world, not only as relatively, but intrinsically, the best and most desirable,—when, not content with swallowing it themselves as medicine, they insist on ramming it down your throat as food,—it is time to buckle on your armor and have at them. ”

“ Your courage in this Titanic strife,—the lavish devotion with which the best blood of your land has been poured out on the field, and the tears of childless mothers shed in homes never before visited by the sorrows of war,—the patriotic generosity with which your treasures have been cast into the gulf opened suddenly in your busy and prosperous land, even as of old in the forum of ancient Rome,—these noble acts of yours inspire with confidence in you, no less than pride in the indomitable energies of our common race. ”

“ I have known a clergyman, in a parish with a bad population, seem suddenly to waken up to a conviction that he must do something to mend matters, and set agoing some weak little machinery, which could produce no appreciable result, and which came to a stop in a few weeks. Yet that faint offer appeared to discharge the claims of conscience, and after it the clergyman remained long time in a comatose state of unhealthy Resignation. But it is a miserable and a wrong kind of Resignation which dwells in that man who sinks down, beaten and hopeless, in the presence of a recognized evil. ”

“ We outnumbered the enemy everywhere, defeated them in every pitched battle, starved them by a vigilant blockade, secured meanwhile the sympathy and support of the whole civilized world by the holiness of our cause, and commanded its respect by the display of our material power and our military capacity,—and in a few short months crushed the Rebellion, restored the Union, vindicated the Constitution, hung the arch-traitors, and saw peace in all our borders. ”

“ We abhor Slavery for itself, and for its own enormous iniquity,—even the robbing from a human being of that freedom which it was the supreme gift of Omnipotence to bestow. We hold, that, were it in the power of the slaveholder to make his slaves absolutely happy, Slavery would not less be an injustice and a crime. Happiness is not to be measured against freedom, else would God have left us brutes, not men, and spared us all the sorrows of struggling humanity. ”

“ His first feeling, that good man said, was of gratification that he had fairly reached the highest reward of the profession to which he had given his life; but the feeling which speedily supplanted that was an overwhelming sense of his responsibility and a grave doubt as to his qualifications. I have always believed, and sometimes said, that good fortune—not so great or so sudden as to injure one's nerves or heart, but kindly and equable—has a most wholesome effect upon human character. I believe that the happier a man is, the better and kinder he will be. ”

“ But where it truly deceives those who practise it, even if it deceive nobody else, you see there is no true Resignation. A man who has made a mess of life has no need to be resigned, if he fancies he has succeeded splendidly. But I look with great interest, and often with deep respect, at the man or woman who feels that life has been a failure,—a failure, that is, as regards this world,—and yet who is quite resigned. ”

“ But Italy has a magnetic virtue quite peculiar to her, which compels alike steel and straw, finding something in men of the most diverse temperaments by which to draw them to herself. Like the Siren, she sings to every voyager a different song, that lays hold on the special weakness of his nature. The German goes thither because Winckelmann and Goethe went, and because he can find there a sausage stronger than his own; the Frenchman, that he may flavor his infidelity with a bitter dash of Ultramontanism, or find fresher zest in his chattering boulevard after the sombre loneliness of Rome ”

“ But looking back to the days which the old yellow letters bring back, you will think to yourself, Where are the hopes and anticipations of that time? You expected to be a great man, no doubt. Well, you know you are not. You are a small man, and never will be anything else; yet you are quite resigned. If there be an argument which stirs me to indignation at its futility, and to wonder that any mortal ever regarded it as of the slightest force, it is that which is set out in the famous soliloquy in "Cato," as to the Immortality of the Soul. ”

“ All manner of novel temptations beset them,—perils by night and perils by day,—perils in the house and by the way. Their fierce and hungry young souls, rioting in awakening consciousness, ravening for pleasure, strong and tumultuous, snatch eagerly at every bait. They want then a mother able to curb, and guide, and rule them; and only a mother who commands their respect can do this. ”

“ Because he is a wise and virtuous and honorable moth, he does not dart into the flame. He does not even scorch his wings. He never thinks of such a thing. He merely circles around the pleasant light, sunning himself in it without much thought one way or another, only feeling that it is pleasant; but meanwhile Mrs. Moth sits at home in darkness, mending the children's clothes, which is not exhilarating. Many a woman who feels that she possesses her husband's affection misses something. She does not secure his fervor, his admiration. ”

“ Who ever heard of the mother of a young and increasing family living in an atmosphere of peace, not to say pleasure, above conflicts and storms? Who does not know that the private history of every family with the ordinary allowance of brains is a record of incessant internecine warfare? If she said less, we might believe her. When she says so much, we cannot help suspecting. To make the best of anything, it is not necessary to declare that it is the best thing. Children must be taken care of, but it is altogether probable that there are too many of them. ”