Various

“ The great harvests of the earth are gathered by his mowing and reaping machines. The flame that is creeping from its lair to spring at the roofs of the crowded city is betrayed to its watchful guardians by the American telegraphic fire-alarm, and the conflagration that reddens the firmament is subdued by the inundation that flows upon it from an American steam-fire-engine. In the realm of air, the Frenchman who sent a bubble of silk to the clouds must divide his honors with the American who emptied the clouds themselves of their electric fires. ”

“ Rachel didn't color at this, but remarked, a little roguishly, that she would rather have one of those sidelong looks I used to give her in the old school-house than all the admiration in the world.
This was the time when I chose my profession, as mentioned in the beginning. And I may say that we have had a good time all our lives. Yet we have known sorrow. Four times has the dark shadow fallen upon our hearts; four sad processions have passed up the narrow lane; four little graves, by the side of Aunt Huldah's, show where, standing together, we wept tears of agony! ”

“ What all the governments based on smothered pauperism, tolerated ignorance, and organized degradation have to fear is the subterranean fire, which finds its vent in blazing craters, or breaks up all the ancient landmarks in earth-shattering convulsions. God forbid that we should invoke any such catastrophe even for those who have been hardest upon us in our bitter trial! Yet so surely as American society founds itself upon the rights of civilized man, there is no permanent safety for any nation but in the progressive recognition of the American principle. ”

“ One, a young artist, finding his invention flag for a whole fortnight, had recourse to Blake.
"It is just so with us," he exclaimed, turning to his wife, "is it not, for weeks together, when the visions forsake us? What do we do then, Kate?"
"We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake."
To these choice spirits, these enthusiastic and confiding friends, his house was the House of the Interpreter. The little back-room, kitchen, bedroom, studio, and parlor in one, plain and neat, had for them a kind of enchantment. That royal presence lighted up the "hole" into a palace. ”

“ Every dynasty sees a natural enemy in a self-governing state. Its dread of that enemy is in exact proportion to the amount of liberty enjoyed by its own people. Freedom is the ferment of Freedom. The moistened sponge drinks up water greedily; the dry one sheds it. Russia has no popular legislation, and her Emperor almost, perhaps quite, loves us. England boasts of her freeborn people, and her governing class, to say the least, does not love us. ”

“ Wild, fragmentary, gorgeous dreams they are, tangled in with strange allegoric words and designs, that throb with their prisoned vitality. The energy, the might, the intensity of his lines and figures it is impossible for words to convey. It is power in the fiercest, most eager action,—fire and passion, the madness and the stupor of despair, the frenzy of desire, the lurid depths of woe, that thrill and rivet you even in the comparatively lifeless rendering of this book. The mere titles of the poems give but a slight clue to their character. Ideas are upheaved in a tossing surge of words. ”

“ It was happiness enough then to think of Rachel sitting in my sister's room,—of Aunt Huldah's keen eyes watching her daily life.
"My plan works," writes Fanny, a week afterwards. "Aunt seems to take a liking to Rachel, which I, if anything, rather discourage, thinking she will be more likely to stick to it. Rachel is a sister after my own heart. I do like those people who, while they are so steady and calm, show by their eyes and the tone of the voice what warm, delicate feelings they are keeping to themselves! She is one of the real good kind! ”

“ And then, when we have all our sketches and lithographs framed and hung here and there, and your flowers blooming as they always do, and your ivies wandering and rambling as they used to, and hanging in the most graceful ways and places, and all those little shells and ferns and vases, which you are always conjuring with, tastefully arranged, I'll venture to say that our rooms will be not only pleasant, but beautiful, and that people will oftener say, 'How beautiful!' when they enter, than if we spent three times the money on new furniture. ”

“ They will reappear, meekly shining in their humbler sphere, when the great light shall withdraw its intenser rays, the object of their blazing being accomplished. The body of the war is Union, its soul Democracy: union for the sake of democracy, and democracy for the sake of the world. Abolitionism is simply a stepping-stone to the perfection of the Idea in our society.
The instinct that apprehended the full significance of the struggle was universal: Europe saw it in the same flash that revealed it to us. ”

“ By incredible labor, bringing down rivulets from the snow-peaks of the Wahsatch range and distributing them over the levels by every ingenious device known to artificial irrigation, the Mormon farmers have converted the bottoms of the cañons through which we approached Salt Lake into fertile fields and pasture-lands, whose emerald sweep soothed our eyes wearied with so many leagues of ashen monotony, as an old home-strain mollifies the ear irritated by the protracted rhythmic clash or the dull, steady buzz of iron machinery. ”

“ How, if the great empire should prove not to have been shattered? how, if the bubble has not burst?—nay, if that great system of intelligent self-government which was taken for a bubble prove to be a sphere of adamant, rounded in the mould of Divine Law, and filled with the pure light of Heaven?
England is happy in a virtuous queen; but what if another profligate like George IV. should, by the accident of birth, become the heir of her sovereignty? France is as strong as one man's life can make her ”

“ Latterly, indeed, they have been less read, for thought is turning to fresh fields, and society seems to be entering upon a new era.
No man more fully recognized the great change that was going on, or did more to help it forward, than Nicolas Fouquet, Vicomte de Vaux, and Marquis de Belleîle,—but better known as the Surintendant. In the pleasant social annals of France, Fouquet is the type of splendor, and of sudden, hopeless ruin. "There was never a man so magnificent, there was never a man so unfortunate," say the lively gentlemen and ladies in their Mémoires. ”

“ We can conquer them by peace better than by war. When the Union emerges from the battle-smoke,—her crest towering over the ruins of traitorous cities and the wrecks of Rebel armies, her eye flashing defiance to all her evil-wishers, her breast heaving under its corselet of iron, her arm wielding the mightiest enginery that was ever forged into the thunderbolts of war,—her triumph will be grand enough without her setting fire to the stubble with which the folly of the Old World has girt its thrones. ”

“ Woman's tender little final touches, which make a dear refuge out of a mud-cabin, and without which palatial brownstone is only a home in the moulding-clay,—those dexterous ornamentations which make so little mean so much,—the brier-rose-slip by the doorstep, growing into the fragrant welcome of many Junes,—the trellised Madeira-vines,—the sunny spot of chrysanthemums, charming summer on to the very brink of frost,—all these things are utterly and everywhere lacking to the Mormon inclosure. ”

“ To-morrow you will be ferried over Green River, as near its source,—a stream whose cradle is in the same snow-peaks as the Platte,—whose mysterious middle-life, under the new name of the Colorado, flows at the bottom of those tremendous fissures, three thousand feet deep, which have become the wonder of the geologist,—whose grave, when it has dribbled itself away into the dotage of shallows and quicksands, is the desert-margined Gulf of California and the Pacific Sea. ”

“ Young men came to him with fresh hearts, and drew out all the freshness of his own. Little children learned to watch for his footsteps over the Hampstead hills, and sat on his knee, sunning him with their caresses. Men who towered above their time, reverencing the god within, and bowing not down to the dæmon à la mode, gathered around him, listened to his words, and did obeisance to his genius. ”

“ But if our theory of human rights and our plan of government are the true ones, then our success is the inevitable downfall of every dynasty on the face of the earth. It is not our fault that this must be so; the blameless fact of our existence, prosperity, power, civilization, culture, as they will show themselves on the supposition that we are working in the divine parallels, will necessarily revolutionize all the empirical and accidental systems which have come down to us from the splendid semi-barbarism of the Middle Ages. ”

“ He was vicious to an extent that surprised even the fastest men of that vicious time,—a gambler, a drunkard, and a loose liver every way, indulging in vices that are held by mild moralists to be excusable in youth who are employed in sowing wild oats, but which are universally admitted to be disgusting in those upon whom age has laid its withering hand. Yet this vicious and ignorant old man had more to do with bringing about the fall of Napoleon than all the generals and statesmen of the Allies combined. He had energy, which is the most valuable of all qualities in a military leader ”

“ The close observer soon notices a painful deficiency in these green and smiling Mormon settlements. Everything has been done for the farm,—nothing for the home. That blessed old Anglo-Saxon idea seems everywhere quite extinct. The fields are billowing over with dense, golden grain, the cattle are wallowing in emerald lakes of juicy grass, the barns are substantial, the family-windmill buzzes merrily on its well-oiled pivot, drawing water or grinding feed, the fruit-trees are thrifty,—but the house is desolate. ”

“ We can never feel in all respects to England as we felt of old. This is a fact which finds expression in so many forms that it is natural to wish to see how deep it lies: whether it is an effect of accidental misunderstanding and collision of interests, or whether it is because the events of the last few years have served to bring to light the organic, inherent, and irreconcilable antagonism of the two countries. ”

“ Let us now go back a hundred years, to the time when William Blake was a fair-haired, smooth-browed boy, wandering aimlessly, after the manner of boys, about the streets of London. It might seem at first a matter of regret that a soul full of all glowing and glorious fancies should have been consigned to the damp and dismal dulness of that crowded city; but, in truth, nothing could be more fit. To this affluent, creative mind dinginess and dimness were not. ”

“ With a congenital difference of organization, with a new theory of human rights involving a virtual reconstruction of society, with larger views of human destiny, with a virgin continent for them to be worked out in, the American should expect to be misunderstood by the civilizations of the past, based on a quagmire of pauperism and ignorance, or overhung by an avalanche of revolution. Other peoples, emerging from, a condition of serfdom, retaining many of the instincts of a conquered race, get what liberty they have by extorting it piecemeal from their masters. ”

“ Water, the mightiest of all, which devours the earth and quenches the fire, and rides over the air in vaporous exhalations, has been the chosen field of ingenious labor for our people. The great American invention of ice,—perhaps there is a certain approach to its own coolness in calling it an invention, though Sancho, it may be remembered, considered sleep in that light,—this remarkable invention of ice, as a tropical commodity, could have sprung only from a republican and revolutionary brain. ”

“ For the warmth with which he espoused an unpopular cause, for the skill with which he set facts in their true light, for the ability which he brought to the defence of a man whom the world had agreed to condemn, for the noble persistence with which he forced attention to genius that had hitherto received little but neglect, we cannot too earnestly express our gratitude. But the greater our admiration of material excellence, the greater is our regret for superficial defects. ”

“ He is young, victorious, wise, valiant, and dignified,—as benevolent and just as he is powerful. He governs his desires as well as his subjects; he unites labor and pleasure; always busy, never at fault, seeing all, hearing all. To such a prince Heaven can refuse nothing. If Louis commands, these Termini shall walk from their places, these trees shall speak better than the oaks of Dodona. Come forth, then, all of you! Louis commands it. ”

“ In the heat of the contest it becomes a succession of short, sharp sentences, as if the musketry rang in the writer's brain and moulded and winged his thoughts. It is calm in the midst of its intensity, and thus happily illustrates by its popularity that self-control of the nation so well expressed by Hawthorne,—that our movements are as cool and collected, if as noisy, as that of a thousand gentlemen in a hall quietly rising at the same moment from their chairs. ”