Various

“ Every time we shake hands, we make a human bridge of courtesy or love; and that was a graceful fancy of one of our ingenious writers to give expression to his thoughts in "Letters from under a Bridge." With an eye and an ear for Nature's poetry, the gleam of lamps from a bridge, the figures that pass and repass thereon, the rush and the lull of waters beneath, the perspective of the arch, the weather-stains on the parapet, the sunshine and the cloud-shadows around, are phases and sounds fraught with meaning and mystery. ”

“ Such hard, grimy problems there are in life! They weaken the eyes that look long at them: stories hard to understand, like that of this old machinist, Joe Starke.
But over yonder, how cool and shady it is on that sweep of green! that rests one so thoroughly, in eyes and brain! The quiet shadows ebb and flow over the uncut grass; every hazy form or color is beyond art, true and beautiful, being fresh from God; there are countless purpled vines creeping out from the earth under that grass; the air trembles with the pure spring healing and light ”

“ But Geoffrey Crayon is a humorist, while the Pilgrim beyond the Sea is a poet. The one looks at the broad aspects of English life with the shrewd, twinkling eye of a man of the world; the other haunts the valley of the Loire, the German street, the Spanish inn, with the kindling fancy of the scholar and poet. The moral and emotional elements are quite wanting in Irving; they are characteristic of Longfellow. But the sweetness of soul, the freedom from cynicism or stinging satire, which is most unusual in American, or in any humorous or descriptive literature, is remarkable in both. ”

“ Just think of a man so bereft of home and family, so accustomed to the common cot of the hospital, so familiar to hospital sights and sounds and odors, that he can associate home with the public ward! Poor Murger!
So lived and so died the poet of youth, and of ambitious, struggling, hopeful poverty. We describe not his funeral, nor the monument reared over his grave. Our heart fails us at sight of these sterile honors. They are ill-timed. What boot they, when he on whom they are bestowed is beyond the reach of earthly voices? ”

“ There the bridge is the least conventional structure, the suggestive point, the favorite locality; it seems to reunite the working-day world with the freedom of Nature; it is perhaps the one spot in the dense array of edifices and thoroughfares which "gives us pause." There, if anywhere, our gaze and our feet linger; people have a relief against the sky, as they pass over it; artists look patiently thither; lovers, the sad, the humorous, and the meditative, stop there to observe and to muse; they lean over the parapet and watch the flowing tide ”

“ You have submitted to the insolent demands of Southern politicians with such prompt and easy acquiescence, that many of your oldest friends have mourned over your lost manhood, and sadly abandoned you to the worship of your ugly and obscene idol. A Northern man, descended from the best Puritan stock, surrounded from childhood by institutions really free, breathing the atmosphere of free thought, enjoying the luxury of free speech, you have deliberately allied yourself to a party which has owed its long-continued political supremacy to the practical denial of these inestimable privileges. ”

“ The public has a mistaken habit of measuring greatness by the capacity to give it pleasure; but the public has no more ignorant habit than this. That is no great work which the popular taste can fully appreciate, and no thoroughly educated man can at once grasp the full calibre of a work of great power differing from his own standard. It took Penelope's nights to unweave the web of her days' weaving, and no sudden shears of untaught comprehension will serve to analyze those finer fabrics of a genius like Delacroix. ”

“ The Suspension Bridge at Niagara is an artificial wonder as great, in its degree, as the natural miracle of the mighty cataract which thunders forever at its side; while no triumph of inventive economy could more aptly lead the imaginative stranger into the picturesque beauties of Wales than the extraordinary tubular bridge across the Menai Strait. The aqueduct-bridge at Lisbon, the long causeway over Cayuga Lake in our own country, and the bridge over the Loire at Orléans are memorable in every traveller's retrospect. ”

“ Are these white men, with Anglo-Saxon blood in their veins, and the fair fame of this country in their keeping? Why, if the most abject slave that ever toiled on a Southern plantation, cast off by his master and compelled to claim the rights of a freeman, should, of his own deliberate choice, elect to return to his miserable vassalage, who would not pronounce him unfit to enjoy the priceless boon of liberty? ”

“ Whoever has truly felt the aërial perspective of Turner has attained a delicate sense of the pictorial significance of the bridge; for, as we look through his floating mists, we descry, amid Nature's most evanescent phenomena, the span, the arch, the connecting lines or masses whereby this familiar image seems to identify itself not less with Nature than with Art. Among the drawings which Arctic voyagers have brought home, many a bridge of ice, enormous and symmetrical, seems to tempt adventurous feet and to reflect a like form of fleecy cloud-land ”

“ There is a narrow road which leaves the main one, and penetrates behind the river-hills, only to find others, lower and more heavily wooded, with now and then odd-shaped bits of pasture-land wedged in between their sides, or else low brick farm-houses set in a field of corn and potatoes, with a dripping pump-trough at the door. It is a thorough country-road, lazy, choking itself up with mud even in summer, to keep city-carriages out, bordering itself with slow-growing maples and banks of lush maiden's-hair, blood-red partridge-berries, and thistles. ”

“ The hills never dare to rise into abrupt earnestness; the two broad, bright-faced rivers that hold it in lapse with a calm consciousness into the sleepy, oyster-bedded bay; even the accretion of human life there never has been able to utter itself in the myriad rebellious phases of a great city, but falls gravely into the drilled monotony of its streets. Brick and mortar will not yield themselves there to express any whim in the mind of their owner: the house-fronts turn the same impassive, show-hating faces on the sidewalks from the Delaware to the Schuylkill. ”

“ Yet it is a wonderful bit of mosaic, this Communist system: a place for every man, and every man in his place; "to insure to each human being the freest development of his faculties": there is a grand fragment of absolute truth in that, a going back to primal Nature, to a like life with that of sunshine and pines, a Utopia more Christ-like than the heaven (which Christ never taught) of eternal harp-playing and golden streets. But as for making it real, every man's life should have the integrity of meaning of that of a tree. ”

“ England boasts no monument of her modern victories so impressive as the bridge named for the most memorable of them. The best view of Prague and its people is from the long series of stone arches which span the Moldau. The solitude and serenity of genius are rarely better realized than by musing of Klopstock and Gessner, Lavator and Zimmermann, on the Bridge of Rapperschwyl on the Lake of Zurich, where they dwelt and wrote or died. ”

“ One of the most primitive tokens of civilization is a bridge; and yet no artificial object is more picturesquely associated with its ultimate symbols: the fallen tree whereon the pioneer crosses a stream in the wilderness is not more significant of human isolation than the fragmentary arch in an ancient city of the vanished homo of thousands. Thus, by its necessity and its survival, a bridge suggests the first exigency and the last relic of civilized life. ”

“ Bowdler was summoned to his back parlor to see a man and woman who had called. Going in, he found Andy, clad as before in his dress-suit of blue coat and marvellously plaid trousers, balancing himself uneasily on the edge of his chair, and a woman in Quaker dress beside him. Her face and presence attracted the Doctor at once, strongly, though they were evidently those of an uneducated working-woman. The quietude in her motions and expression, the repressed power, the delicacy, had worked out, from within, to carve her sad face into those fine lines he saw. No outside culture could do that. ”

“ The laws of architecture illustrate this principle copiously; but in no single and familiar product of human skill is it more striking than in bridges; if lightness, symmetry, elegance, proportion charm the ideal sense, not less are the economy and adaptation of the structure impressive to the eye of science. Perhaps the ideas of use and beauty, of convenience and taste, in no instance, coalesce more obviously; and therefore, of all human inventions, the bridge lends the most undisputed charm to the landscape. ”

“ By such men and such utterances will the Democratic party secure the respect and admiration of mankind; while those spurious Democrats, whose hearts are with the South while their homes are in the North, whose voice is the voice of Jacob while their hands are the hands of Esau, whose first slavish impulse is to kiss the rod which smites them, and who long for nothing so much as the triumph of their Southern masters, have earned, and will surely receive, the contempt and detestation of all honest men, now and forever. ”

“ What lines of grace are added to the night view of a great city by the lights on the bridges! what subtile principles enter into the building of such a bridge as the Britannia, where even the metallic contraction of the enormous tubes is provided for by supporting them on cannon-balls! how venerable seems the most graceful of Tuscan bridges, when we remember it was erected in the fifteenth century,—and the Rialto, when we think that it was designed by Michel Angelo! ”

“ Let us have no more sympathetic, however once legal, lies for oppression and wrong. We shall be as good as a thousand years old, when we are through our struggle. For the respect of Europe let us have no anxiety. It will come cordially or by constraint, upon the victory of the right and the reinstating of our manhood by the divine law, to the discouragement of all iniquity at home or abroad. Our success will be a signal for all the tyrannies, in which the proud and strong have been falsely banded together to crush the ignorant and lowly, to come down. ”

“ The French stage occupies the position our Congress once held, when its halls were adorned by the great men, the Clays, Calhouns, Websters, of our fathers' days, or the Supreme Court occupied, when Marshall sat in the chief seat on its bench, and William Pinckney brought to its bar his elaborate eloquence, and William Wirt his ornate and touching oratory. The stage is to France what Parliament is to England. It is more: it is the mirror and the fool; it glasses society's form and pressure; it criticizes folly. Murger's success on the stage opened every door of publicity to him. ”

“ If, after all, the end of science, of fact and fiction, of watching those raspberry-bushes growing, or of watching the phases of these terrible years in which we live, were only to give us glimpses of that eternal Order, so that we could lie down in it, grow out of it, like that ground-ivy in the earth and sunshine yonder, sure, as it is, that there is no chance nor waste in our own lives? ”

“ To all true and loyal men, he resembles rather the veiled prophet of Khorassan, concealing behind the fair mask of a zealous regard for free speech and a free press the hideous features of Secession and civil war, despising the dupes whom he is leading to certain and swift destruction, and clinging fondly to the hope of involving in a common ruin, not only the party which he represents, but the country which he has dishonored. ”

“ Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Watteau, Reynolds, Gainsborough, Turner, and Delacroix, kept the line of color, now at last utterly extinguished. Now we reason, now we see facts; sentiment is out of joint, and appearances are known to be liars; we have found the greater substance; we kindle with the utilities, and worship with the aspiring spirit of a common humanity; we banish the saints from our souls and the gewgaws from our garments, and walk clothed and in our right minds in what we believe to be the noonday light of reason and science. ”

“ Is this loyalty to the Constitution and the Union? Is this the allegiance which a citizen owes to his country? Away with the mischievous sophistry, that the Government is not the country, and does not represent the people! Can any sane man doubt that an Administration legally chosen, and rightfully in power, and receiving the emphatic indorsement of decisive majorities in Congress, does, during its constitutional term of office, and while so supported, speak the mind and embody the will of the nation? ”

“ The sunshine is sunshine, and the pine-burr a pine-burr, obstinately, through and through. So Nature rests us. But whatever grows out of a man's brain is like the brain, patched, uncertain: a perverse streak in it somewhere, to spoil its thorough good or ill meaning.
There is a little Grecian temple yonder, back of the evergreens, with a triangular stove-funnel revolving at its top; and next door a Dutch-built stable, with a Turk's turban for a cupola; and just beyond that, a châlet-roof, sprouting without any provocation whatever out of an engine-house. ”

“ I mean those who, without any love for Rebels or their cause, are yet so fearful of being called Republicans that they refuse to support the Government. Can you justify yourself in standing upon such a platform? Is this a time in which to permit your old party animosities to render you indifferent to the honor and welfare of the nation? Are you simply in the position of a violent partisan out of office, eager to embarrass the Administration, and keenly on the watch to discover how best to inflame the prejudices of the populace against the Government? ”

“ In vigor, in point, in command of language and felicity of phrase, in affluence and aptness of illustration, in barbed keenness and cling of sarcasm, in terror of invective, in moral weight and momentum, in copiousness and quality of thought, in aggressive boldness of statement, finally in equality to all audiences and readiness for all occasions, Wendell Phillips is certainly the first orator in America,—and that we esteem much the same as saying that he is first among those whose vernacular is the English tongue. ”

“ For the system of Slavery is confessedly the very essence of an Aristocracy, while the genuine idea of a Democracy is the submission of all to the expressed will of the majority. Take as one of the latest illustrations of the irreconcilable difference between Aristocracy and Democracy, the manner in which the South received the doctrine of "Squatter Sovereignty." This doctrine, whatever its ultimate purpose might have been, certainly embodied the idea of a democracy, pure and simple, resting on the right of a people to enact their own laws and adopt their own institutions. ”

“ So, all the time, in the cool autumn-mornings, in the heavy lull of noon, or with the low harvest-moon slanting blue and white shadows, sharp and uncanny, across its surface, the water flows steadily from its dark birthplace, clear, cheerful, bright. The hills crouch attentive on its edge, shaggy with shadows; from the grim rocks ferns and mosses sleep out delicate color unmolested, the red-bearded grass drops its seed unshaken. ”

“ Their lives developed their instincts, and their instincts their art. They loved color more than everything else; and therefore color made herself known to them in her rarest and noblest beauty. They went to Nature as children, and Nature met them as a loving mother meets her child, with her happiest smile and the richest of her gifts. I do not believe that to any Venetian painter the thought of whether a given tint was true ever came ”