Various

“ Once more the heart grows tenderly appreciative of the commonest blessings. That you have a roof to shelter you, and a pillow for your head, and love and light and supper, and something in store for Sunday,—that the raving rain is excluded, and the wolfish wind howls in vain,—that those dearest to you are gathered about your hearth, and all is well,—it is enough; the full soul asks no wore.
But this particular Saturday evening brought no such suffusion of bliss to Fessenden's,—if, indeed, any ever did. ”

“ But it is in those public meetings that the Roman court puts on all its splendor. The very hall has a grave and imposing air about it that inspires serious thoughts in serious minds, and checks, for a moment, the frivolous vivacity of lighter ones. You cannot look at the walls without feeling a solemn sadness steal over you, as you think of the thousands of your fellow-creatures who have gazed on them with the same freshness and fulness of life with which you now gaze on them, since Raphael and Michel Angelo first clothed them with their own immortal conceptions, three hundred years ago. ”

“ He liked me, because I was good to the old folks, and to Emily,—and had a sort of respect for me, because I was the oldest, and because I could talk, and because of the great thick books in my room. I respected him, because I had seen the world and its shams, and knew him to be good all the way through, and because he couldn't talk, and also, perhaps, because he was so much bigger and handsomer than I. In fact, I should have felt quite downhearted about my own looks, if I hadn't learned from books—not the thick ones—that sallow-looking men, with dark eyes, are interesting. ”

“ Reade. The conception of an artless woman is impossible with him. Plenty of beautiful ideals he creates, but with the actual woman he is almost unacquainted: Lucy Fountain, of all his feminine characters, is the only one whose counterpart we have ever met; Julia, the most perfect type of his fancy, impetuous, sparkling, and sweet, has this to say for herself, on occasion of a boat-race:—"'We have won at last,' cried Julia, all on fire, 'and fairly; only think of that!'" Through every sentence that he jots down runs a vein of gentle satire on the sex. ”

“ In view of all these facts, it can be conceived that nothing would be so certain to be followed by a revolutionary outbreak as the addition of a kreutzer to the price of a mass of beer.
The wit which sparkles and flashes in a Bavarian beer-house may be as much less boisterous, or rather as much more quiet, than that which explodes over the distilled spirits of our bar-rooms, as the stimulant itself is less exciting, but is for this very reason the more genuine. ”

“ But, while eager to make history simple and orderly, they forget to make it human. There is an order and progress, perhaps, but an order and progress of what? Of men? Of human souls, self-moved? No, of sticks floating on a current, of straws blown by the wind! Men, according to this theory, are but ninepins in an alley which Nature sets up only to bowl them down again; and what avails it, if Nature makes improvement and learns to set them up better and better? The triumphs are hers, not theirs. ”

“ Trollope has learned much in what is called the realist school; but he has not taken lessons in psychology. Even while looking into Crosbie's heart, we never lose sight of Courcy Castle, of his Club, of his London life; we cross the threshold of his inner being, we knock at the door of his soul, but we remain within call of Lily Dale and the Lady Alexandrina. We never see Crosbie the man, but always Crosbie the gentleman, the Government clerk. We feel at times as if we had a right to know him better,—to know him at least as well as he knew himself. ”

“ Yet it has been apparent that the British ministers have borne us no good-will. Whatever justice has been done us has been done grudgingly,—with the moroseness of an enemy who is compelled to yield. While Lord Russell has been cautious how he offended our Government in acts, his repeated sneers in Parliament, at dinners, and on the hustings have exhibited the rancor of a jealous mind. There has been no hearty will to do justice, no word other than of discouragement. Even the amicable assurances which customarily pass between the statesmen of two nations seem to have been dropped. ”

“ We go to Rome in order to see and to feel, rather than to study and to think. The past crowds upon us overladen with history and poetry; and the present is so full of new forms of life that it is only when we come to sit down at a distance and gather up our recollections that we ask ourselves how all the instruments of that gorgeous pageantry are put together and moved. The Pope has palaces and villas. ”

“ He excels in the art of distilling a drop of poison in a phial of perfume so as to render the poison delicious and the perfume venomous. His prose is as attractive and magnetizing as a woman slightly compromised in public opinion, and who does not tell all her secrets, but increases her attractions both by what she shows and by what she conceals. Monsieur Sainte-Beuve has had no desire but to be a pilgrim of ideas, lacking the first requisite in a pilgrim, which is faith. He has circumnavigated, merely in the character of amateur, every doctrine of the century ”

“ The friendly black faces around him,—the cheerful, sympathetic, rich-toned voices,—the motherly kindness of the old woman,—the exquisite smiling politeness of the old man, who got up and shook hands with him, on an average, every half-hour,—the Bible-reading,—the singing,—the praying,—the elegance and condescension of Gentleman Bill,—the pleasant looks and words of the laughing-eyed girls,—and the irrepressible merriment of Joe, made that a golden Sabbath in the lad's life. ”

“ Economy is the science of proportion. Whether a particular purchase is extravagant depends mainly on the income it is taken from. Suppose a woman has a hundred and fifty a year for her dress, and gives fifty dollars for a bonnet; she gives a third of her income;—it is a horrible extravagance, while for the woman whose income is ten thousand it may be no extravagance at all. The poor clergyman's wife, when she gives five dollars for a bonnet, may be giving as much, in proportion to her income, as the woman who gives fifty. ”

“ The sovereign, the most liberal and enlightened Czar who ever ascended the Muscovite throne, has expressed himself again and again the constant friend of the Union. It is agreeable to reflect that that vast empire, now far on its way to a liberal constitution, and hastened, instead of retarded by its august head, should lend the moral force of its unqualified good-will to the cause of American liberty. The noble words of Prince Gortschakoff to our envoy will be grateful to every loyal American heart:—"We desire above all things the maintenance of the American Union, as one indivisible nation. ”

“ His hopes and aspirations are all directed to one object, trained to flow in a dark and narrow channel, on which the sunbeams never play, and which the pure breath of Nature never visits. His brothers and sisters have a thousand things to talk about and think about which he has no part in. If he joins in their games, it is still as the abbatino: the formal small-clothes and narrow neckband and three-cornered hat that contrast so strongly with their gay dresses are ever present to remind him and them that they have different paths to travel, and have already entered upon them. ”

“ The real charm of the book, however, lies in the beautiful relation which it pictures between mother and children, and in the nature of the daughter herself, so exuberant, so dancing, yet the foam subsiding into such a luminous body of clearness, which so lights up the page with its loveliness, that, seeing how an artless woman is foreign to Mr. Reade's ideas, we are forced to believe that Nature was too strong for him and he wrote against the grain. ”

“ There are a thousand descriptions of Rome, its antiquities, galleries, ceremonies, and manners, but hardly any, that I remember, of the organization of the Papal Government,—that wonderful power which long played the chief part in the social and political revolutions of Europe, which, even in its decay, preserves so much of its original grandeur, and still clings to its traditions with a tenacity of conviction that commands our respect, although the remembrance of the evil that it has done compels us, as men and as Christians, to rejoice at the prospect of its fall. ”

“ It is thus that subjects which sit upon us as holiday-clothes are, in a society of German literati, who are together every day at dinner, or over their coffee after dinner, and every evening over their beer, become to them as their every-day clothing. I am not of those who deem this result well purchased at the price of the refining influence of the other sex, and the virtual breaking-up of family-life; but if some middle way could be hit upon to secure the two advantages at once, both science and society would be great gainers. ”

“ There is a body of reserves always in waiting upon the vast army of regular ecclesiastics: men ready to push forward into the ranks, but who stop short at the prima tonsura till they have ascertained how much their chances will be bettered by taking the final and irrevocable step. Yet, although they now and then bring somewhat more of worldly leaven into their intellectual and moral training, they well know that there is but one road to the red hat and the tiara, and that they who give themselves up to this ambition must give themselves up to it with undivided hearts. ”

“ Do not look for a Bacona, a Newtona, a Handella, a Victoria Huga. Some American ladies tell us education has stopped the growth of these. No, Mesdames! These are not in Nature. They can bubble letters in ten minutes that you could no more deliver to order in ten days than a river can play like a fountain. They can sparkle gems of stories; they can flash little diamonds of poems. The entire sex has never produced one opera, nor one epic that mankind could tolerate a minute: and why?—these come by long, high-strung labor. ”

“ I soon discovered that the ideal and the real are two hostile brothers. De Balzac's works had kindled sincere enthusiasm in my breast. Monsieur Jules Sandeau showed me the dash of madness and of ingenuous depravity mixed with incontestable genius in that powerful mind. He told me of De Balzac's insane vanity, of his furious passion for wealth and luxury, of his readiness to plunge and to drag others after him into the most hazardous adventures, and of his insensibility to commercial honor.
After parting from Monsieur Jules Sandeau, I strolled towards a circulating-library. ”

“ The Sisters of Charity and the Friends, each with their different costume of plainness and self-denial, and other noble-hearted women of no particular outward order, but kindred in spirit, have shown to womanhood, on the battle-field and in the hospital, a more excellent way,—a beauty and nobility before which all the common graces and ornaments of the sex fade, appear like dim candles by the pure, eternal stars. ”

“ From two such natures as David and his wife nothing less noble should spring; and therefore, through necessity, their daughter Julia, the heroine of "Very Hard Cash," is that ideal of vehemence and sweetness which we find her, not by any choice or fancy of the writer, but on account of fate, natural deduction, and a priori logic. She is, however, for all that, to some extent a creation; one may imagine her, long for her, look for her,—one will not immediately find her. Youth never was painted so well as here; both Julia and Alfred are aureoled in its beauty ”

“ We know too well that no one can take the place of him who has just left us, and who touched so truly the chords of every passion; but out of the ranks some one must step now to the leadership so deserted,—for Dickens reigns in another region,—and whether or not it shall be Charles Reade depends solely upon his own election: no one else is so competent, and nothing but wilfulness or vanity need prevent him,—the wilfulness of persisting in certain errors, or the vanity of assuming that he has no farther to go. ”

“ His error has been in adulterating that which he might have put, with singular grace, talents, and natural superiority, pure into currency,—in acting as if literature were a war of treachery, where one was constantly obliged to keep a sword in the hand and a poniard in the pocket. They say he is at great pains to provide himself with an immense arsenal of defensive and offensive weapons, that he may be able to crush those he loves to-day and may detest to-morrow, and those he hates to-day and wishes to wreak vengeance on hereafter. ”

“ Ladies have the same provision in their families, as also students, and all who occupy rented rooms in connection with the families of the city; from ten to one o'clock servant-girls, with pitchers in their hands and immense bunches of keys hanging to their apron-strings, are seen running to and from the neighboring beer-houses thick as butterflies floating in a summer sun, and seem far more as if on business requiring haste. ”

“ Only the old man and Miss Joey left. Still I could not go away. No other place seemed like home. And besides, I had found out, long ago, my own secret. It had been revealed to me, day by day, as I watched Mary Ellen in the sick-room of Emily,—as I observed her patience, her sweetness, her tenderness!
And my secret came upon me with an overwhelming power. But I mastered it. I kept it to myself. That is, as far as words were concerned. For the expression of his face, for involuntary glances, no man can be held responsible. ”

“ Progress? Yes, indeed; but wooden progress, observe.
Mr. Kingsley recognizes human beings, and recognizes them heartily,—loves, hates, admires, despises; in fine, he deals with history not merely as a scientist or theorist, but first of all as a man. There are those who will think this weak. They are superior to this partiality of man for himself, they! They would be ashamed not to sink the man in the savant. But Mr. Kingsley refuses to dehumanize himself in order to become historian and philosopher. He does well. ”

“ Their favorite doctrine, that governments within a government cannot exist, and that our Constitution is weakened by the accession of every new State and the rise of every new disagreement, is meeting its refutation every day. A concentration of extraordinary power at the centre does not seem to shatter every bond of union, as they have predicted,—and the States hold together and work together with amazing zeal for so feeble a tie as that they have represented. ”

“ I think there is, for some reason, more false shame among Americans about economy than among Europeans. 'I cannot afford it' is more seldom heard among us. A young man beginning life, whose income may be from five to eight hundred a year, thinks it elegant and gallant to affect a careless air about money, especially among ladies,—to hand it out freely, and put back his change without counting it,—to wear a watch-chain and studs and shirt-fronts like those of some young millionnaire. ”

“ If all the money spent on tobacco and liquors could be spent in books and pictures, I predict that nobody's health would be a whit less sound, and houses would be vastly more attractive. There is enough money spent in smoking, drinking, and over-eating to give every family in the community a good library, to hang everybody's parlor-walls with lovely pictures, to set up in every house a conservatory which should bloom all winter with choice flowers, to furnish every dwelling with ample bathing and warming accommodations, even down to the dwellings of the poor ”

“ Let the word tea be erased from our vocabulary, and from our minds all the cheerful associations which it awakens, and there passes from our hearts none can tell how much of that which we most fondly cherish there,—the family of both sexes, and occasionally some neighbors and friends, seated around the table,—the gently stimulating narcotic diffusing a charm over the whole social being, and communicating itself to the vocal machinery. ”

“ He had been describing the last great battle of the Eastern Goths, after which they literally disappeared from history. And the reason of their defeat and destruction, he avers, was simply this, that they were a slaveholding aristocracy. As such they must perish; the earth, he declares, will not and cannot afford them a dwelling-place. Indeed, he repeatedly lays it down as a law of history that slaveholding aristocracies must go down before the progress of the world, and must go down in blood. ”