Various

“ If in its walls there were any broad chinks through which a wind might make its way, there were other draughts to send it back again,—strains of music, that helped to kindle the household hearth,—such strains as made sacred the seed that was laid in the earth, that refined coarse labor, that softened the tone of the new colony rising up around, so that life, even the rudest, was made noble, and the work was not merely for the body, but for the spirit, and a new land was planted under these strains of the musician. ”

“ When we were little, and geography and history were but printed words on white paper, not places and events, Jane McCrea was to us no suffering woman, but a picture of a low-necked, long-skirted, scanty dress, long hair grasped by a half-naked Indian, and two unnatural-looking hands raised in entreaty. It was interesting as a picture, but it excited no pity, no horror, because it was only a picture. We never saw women dressed in that style. We knew that women did not take journeys through woods without bonnet or shawl, and we spread a veil of ignorant, indifferent incredulity over the whole. ”

“ But it is enough for the poor mother, whose eyes are blinded with tears, that she sees a print of drapery like an infant's dress, and a rounded something, like a foggy dumpling, which will stand for a face: she accepts the spirit-portrait as a revelation from the world of shadows. Those who have seen shapes in the clouds, or remember Hamlet and Polonius, or who have noticed how readily untaught eyes see a portrait of parent, spouse, or child in almost any daub intended for the same, will understand how easily the weak people who resort to these places are deluded. ”

“ Overhead, the wind from the yet frozen hills swept in such strong currents, the great city throbbed with such infinite kinds of motion, and down in the harbor yonder the rush of couriers came and went incessantly from the busy world without. Grey was a country-girl: in this throbbing centre of human life she felt suddenly lost, atom-like,—drew her breath quickly, as she clung to Paul's arm. The world was so vast, was hurrying on so fast. She must get to work in earnest: why, one must justify her right to live, here. ”

“ Where there was a glimpse of heaven, it opened the heavens wider; where there was already hell, it made the abysses gape deeper. For those few moments each soul communed with itself, and met with a shuddering there, or an exaltation, as the case might be.
After those few moments, outside life resumed its sway. Buzzing talk swept out the memory of the music. One song from an opera brought thought back to its usual level. Men and women looked at each other through their opera-glasses, and, bringing distant outside life close to them, fancied themselves in near communion with it. ”

“ There are homes where men and women enfranchise themselves from the cursed laws of society,—Phalansteries,—where each soul develops itself out of the inner centre of eternal truth and love according to its primal bent, free to yield to its instincts and affinities. I learned their theory long ago, but I never believed in it until now. We will go there, Grey. We will be governed by the laws of our own nature. It will be a free, beautiful life, my own. Music and Art and Nature shall surround us with an eternal harmony. We will have work, true work, such as suits our native power ”

“ One of their photographs is lying before us. Boston, as the eagle and the wild goose see it, is a very different object from the same place as the solid citizen looks up at its eaves and chimneys. The Old South and Trinity Church are two landmarks not to be mistaken. Washington Street slants across the picture as a narrow cleft. Milk Street winds as if the cowpath which gave it a name had been followed by the builders of its commercial palaces. Windows, chimneys, and skylights attract the eye in the central parts of the view, exquisitely defined, bewildering in numbers. ”

“ By-and-by, as he warms towards you, he sends you the picture of what lies next to his heart,—a lovely boy, for instance, such as laughs upon us in the delicious portrait on which we are now looking, or an old homestead, fragrant with all the roses of his dead summers, caught in one of Nature's loving moments, with the sunshine gilding it like the light of his own memory. ”

“ Do they love the sea? Is it a home to them? Have they that fertility of resources and expedients which the emergencies of sea-life make so essential, and which can come only from a long and fearless familiarity with old Ocean in all his aspects of beauty and all his aspects of terror? Or are they essentially landsmen,—landsmen just as much on the deck of a frigate as when marshalled on a battle-field? This is a test question. For if a nation has not sailors, men who smack of the salt sea, then vain are proud fleets and strong armaments. ”

“ If all the use England had for her navy were to defend London and Liverpool, she would do well to abandon many of her distant strongholds, which have been won at such cost, and which are kept with such care. If all our ships had to do were to keep the enemy out of Boston harbor and New York bay, it would not matter much, if every friendly port fifty miles from our own borders were closed against us. But the protection of our own ports is not by any means the chief work of fleets. The protection of commerce is as vital a duty. Commerce is the life-blood of a nation. ”

“ It would cramp me to put on a dignity for which I was not created. Already I am cramped by the circumstances out of which I was born. I cannot express strains of music that I hear in my highest dreams, because my powers are weak, and fail me as often the strings of my instrument fail my fingers. To put on any of the conventionalities of life, any of its honors, even the loves of life, would be to put on so many constraints the more."
"That is because you have never loved," said Carl.
"That may be," said Arnold,—"because I have never loved anything but music. ”

“ What is a nation's capacity for naval production? What ship-yards has it? What docks? What machine-shops? What stores of timber, iron, and hemp? And what skilled workmen to make these resources available? A nation is not strong simply because it has a hundred ships complete and armed floating on its waters. "Iron and steel will bend and break," runs the old nursery-tale. And practice shows that iron and steel wrought into ships have no better fortune, and that the stoutest barks will strand and founder, or else decay, and, amid the sharp exigencies of war, with wonderful rapidity. ”

“ I do not care to move the world!"
"And will England move you more than Germany?" asked Carl; "will the hearts of a new place touch you more than those of home? The closer you draw to a man, the better you can read his heart, and learn that he has a heart. It is not the number of friends that gives us pleasure, but the warmth of the few."
"In music I find my real life," Arnold went on, "because in music I forget myself. Is music, then, an unreal life? In real life must self always be uppermost? ”

“ With your love of harmony, you yourself would not be pleased to see a cotton dress hanging across a damask couch, or rude manners interrupt a stately dinner. The sound of the titles clangs well as you are ushered up through the redoubled apartments. If the play is in the Quatorze time, let it be played out. A princess deserves at least a lord for a husband."
"Very well, if the question is of marriage," answered Arnold; "but in love, a woman loves a man, not a title; and if a woman marries as she loves, she marries the man, not the lordship."
"But this is a true princess," said his friend Carl. ”

“ Lizzy, scanning their faces, scanning every face in pit or boxes, discerned a good will and wish on each. Something wholesome and sound in her heart received it, half afraid.
"I don't know," she thought.
One of the windows was open, and out beyond the gas-light and smells of the theatre she could see a glimpse of far space, with the eternal stars shining. There had been once a man who loved her: he, looking down, could see her now. If she had stayed at home, selfish and useless, there might have been a chance for her yonder. ”

“ Here is the nest of that feeble fowl, self-consciousness, whose brood strays at large over all the features.
If you wish to see the very look your friend wore when his portrait was taken, let not the finishing artist's pencil intrude within the circle of the vital knot of expression.
We have learned many curious facts from photographic portraits which we were slow to learn from faces. One is the great number of aspects belonging to each countenance with which we are familiar. Sometimes, in looking at a portrait, it seems to us that this is just the face we know, and that it is always thus. ”

“ But would there be any fairness in construing this clause into an admission, by inference or otherwise, that an apprentice, while "bound to service," is a slave? Clearly not. He is a person not free for the time, because another has a legal claim to his service or labor. The Constitution admits this: nothing more.
And so of slaves. "Other persons" they are called, in contradistinction to "free persons"; therefore persons not free: and properly so called, seeing that, like the apprentice before his term expires, they are "bound to service," and that, unlike him, they remain thus bound for life. ”

“ Altogether, the war gives quite a zest to life up here. Then, in these low-hill valleys of the Alleghanies the sun pours its hottest, most life-breeding glow, and even the wintry wind puts all its vigor into the blast, knowing that there are no lachrymose, whey-skinned city-dyspeptics to inhale it, but full-breasted, strong-muscled women and men,—with narrow brains, maybe, but big, healthy hearts, and physique to match. Very much the same type of animal and moral organization, as well as natural, you would have found before the war began, ran through the valley of Pennsylvania and Virginia. ”

“ After a persevering course of entreaty and persuasion, a set is drafted, the music galvanizes, and the dance begins.
I like to see people do with their might whatsoever their hands or their tongues or their feet find to do. A half-and-half performance of the right is just about as mischievous as the perpetration of the wrong. It is vacillation, hesitation, lack of will, feebleness of purpose, imperfect execution, that works ill in all life. ”

“ Destroy that, and you destroy what supports the people and the government which is over the people. But if commerce is to be protected, war-ships must not hug timidly the shore. They must put boldly out to sea, and be wherever commerce is. They must range the stormy Atlantic. They must ply to and fro over that primitive home of commerce, the Mediterranean. Doubling the Cape, they must visit every part of the affluent East and of the broad Pacific. With restless energy they must plough every sea and explore every water where the hope of honest gain may entice the busy merchantman. ”

“ Wrathful, loathsome fingers clutch the long, fair hair that even the fingers of love have caressed but with reverent half-touch,—and love, and hope, and life go out in one dread moment of horror and despair. Now, through the reverberations of more than fourscore years, through all the tempest-rage of a war more awful than that, and fraught, we hope, with a grander joy, a clear, young voice, made sharp with agony, rings through the shuddering woods, cleaves up through the summer sky, and wakens in every heart a thrill of speechless pain. ”

“ But it is the misfortune of progress that one is forced not only to unlearn a great deal, but, if one has been in the habit of communicating his ideas to others, to destroy much of his own work. I now find myself in this predicament; and after teaching my students for years that the Carboniferous epoch belongs to the Palæozoic or Primary age, I am convinced—and this conviction grows upon me constantly as I free myself from old prepossessions and bias on the subject—that with the Carboniferous epoch we have the opening of the Secondary age in the history of the world. ”