Various

“ We no longer see the whirling universe, or feel the pulsing of life. Thought itself has ceased to be a sprite, and flows through the mind only in the leaden shape of printed sentences. The symbolism of letters is over us all. An all-pervading nominalism has completely masked whatsoever there is that is real. More and more it is not the soul and Nature, but the eye and print, whose resultant is thought. Nature disappears and the mind withers. No other faculty has been developed in man but that of the reader, no other possibility but that of the writer. ”

“ Martyrdom may desolate, but cannot terrify him. If he be a genius, if his soul crave only his idea, and his body fare unconsciously well on bread and water, then his lot is happy, and fortune can present no ills which will not shrink before his burning eye. But if he be less than this, he is lost, the sport of devouring elements. As he fights fate on the border of ruin, so much the more should he be animated by courage, ambition, pride, purpose, and faith. To him literature is a high adventure, and impossible as a profession. ”

“ The newspapers are marvels of mental industry. They show how much work can be done in a day, but they never last more than a day. Sad will it be when the genius of ephemerality has invaded all departments of human actions and human motives! Farewell then to deep thoughts, to sublime self-sacrifice, to heroic labors for lasting results! Time is turned into a day, the mind knows only momentary impressions, the weary way of art is made as short as a turnpike, and the products of genius last only about as long as any mood of the weather. ”

“ Benjamin enjoyed it.
"Well, Sir, be that as it may, if I understand you, the dispute between your government and ours is narrowed down to this: Union or Disunion."
"Yes; or to put it in other words: Independence or Subjugation."
"Then the two governments are irreconcilably apart. They have no alternative but to fight it out. But it is not so with the people. They are tired of fighting, and want peace; and as they bear all the burden and suffering of the war, is it not right they should have peace, and have it on such terms as they like?" ”

“ Why didn't we make young Gingerford in love with—let's see—Miss Frisbie? and Miss Frisbie's brother (it would have required but a stroke of the pen to give her one) in love with—Creshy Williams? What melodramatic difficulties might have been built upon this foundation! And as for Fessenden's being a fool and a pauper, he should turn out to be the son of some proud man, either Gingerford or Frisbie. But it is too late now. We acknowledge our fatal mistake. Who cares for the fortunes of a miserable negro family? Who cares to know the future of Mr. Williams, or of any of his race? ”

“ The machineries of life are not for him. He enters into no one of the departments of human routine. He has no relations with the course of the dull world; he is not quite a man, as the world goes, and not at all an angel, as the celestials see. He must be his own motive, path, and guide, his own priest, king, and law. The world may be his footstool, and may be his slough of despond, but is never his final end. His aims are transcendental, his realm is art, his interests ideal, his life divine, his destiny immortal. ”

“ We live in the age of authors triumphant. By swiftly succeeding and countless publications they occupy the eye of the world, and achieve happiness before their death. The stratagems of literature mark no longer a struggle between genius and the bailiffs. What was once a desperate venture is now a lucrative business. What was once a martyrdom is now its own reward. What once had saintly unearthliness is now a powerful motor among worldly interests. What was once the fatality of genius is now the aspiration of fools. ”

“ The long ranges of history have left with us one definite idea: it is that of progress, the intellectual passion of our time. All our science demonstrates it, all our poetry sings it. Democracy is the last term of political progress. Popular intelligence and virtue are the conditions of democracy. To produce these is the mission of periodical literature. The vast complexities of the world, all knowledge and all purpose, are being reduced in the crucible of the popular mind to a common product. Knowledge lives neither in libraries nor in rare minds, but in the general heart. ”

“ There is a science older than anything but shadowy traditions, and immemorially linked with religion, poetry, and art. It is the almost forgotten science of symbolism. Symbols, as compared with letters, are a higher and more potent style of expression. They are the earthly shadows of eternal truth. It is the language of the fine arts, of painting, sculpture, the stage,—it will be the language of life, when, rising in the scale of being, we shall return from the dead sea of literature to the more energetic algebra of symbolical meanings. ”

“ Great men are already mythical, and great ideas are admitted only so far as we, the people, can see something in them. By no great books or long treatises, but by a ceaseless flow of brevities and repetitions, is the pulverized thought of the world wrought into the soul. It is amazing how many significant passages in history and in literature are reproduced in the essays of magazines and the leaders of newspapers by allusion and illustration, and by constant iteration beaten into the heads of the people. ”

“ Finely as he had discoursed at the hut of the negroes, before the corpse was brought out, that was scarcely the time, that was certainly not the place, for a crowning effort of his genius. But here, his larger audience, the open air, the blue heavens, the graves around, the burial of the young girl side by side with the old slave, all contributed to inspire him. Human brotherhood, universal love, the stern democracy of death, immortality,—these were his theme. Life, incrusted with conventionalities; Death, that strips them all away. ”

“ There is never a hillside under whose oaks or chestnuts I lounge upon a smoky afternoon of August, but a pocket Elia is as coveted and as cousinly a companion as a pocket Walton, or a White of Selborne. And upon wet days in my library, I conjure up the image of the thin, bent old gentleman—Charles Lamb—to sit over against me, and I watch his kindly, beaming eye, as he recites with poor stuttering voice,—between the whiffs of his pipe,—over and over, those always new stories of "Christ's Hospital," and the cherished "Blakesmoor," and "Mackery End." ”

“ But the fine arts must in their nature be lawless. Appointments cannot be made for them any more than for the thunder-storms which sweep the sky. They die when they cease to be wild. Literary life, at its best, is a desperate play, but it is with guineas, and not with coppers, to all who truly play it. Its elements would not be finer, were they the golden and potent stars of alchemistic and astrological dreams.
Such was genius, and such was literature, in the representation of their first great lawgiver. But the world has changed. ”

“ But neither the genius of man, nor his length of days, has had an increase corresponding to that of the realm of knowledge, the requirements of reading, and the conditions of intelligence. The multiplied attractions only crowd and obstruct the necessarily narrow line of duty, possibility, and destiny. Life threatens to be extinguished by its own shadow, by the débris kept in the current by countless tenacious records. Its essence escapes to heaven or into new forms, but its ghosts still walk the earth in print. ”

“ Once organized by genius and consecrated by precedent, they become mighty elements in history, revelling amid the wealthy energy of life, exhausting the forces of the intellect, clipping the tendrils of affection, becoming colossal in the architecture of society and dorsal in its traditions, and tyrannizing with the heedless power of an element, to the horror of the pious soul which called it into existence, over all departments of human activity. ”

“ He would trace his idea in the massive architecture and groping science of Egypt,—in the elegant forms of worship, thought, institutes, and life among the Greeks,—in the martial and systematizing genius of Rome,—and so on through the ecclesiastical life of the Middle Ages, and the political and scientific ambitions of modern times. Its operations have everywhere been chemical, not mechanical. It has lived, not in the letter, but in the spirit. Never dropping to the earth, it has been maintained as a shuttlecock in spiritual regions by the dynamics of the soul. ”

“ It is a shock,—but he never once loses his self-possession. His quick perception detects Friend Frisbie behind the gun; and he smiles with his intelligent, fine-cut face. Shall malice have the pleasure of knowing that the shot has told? Our orator is too sagacious for that. There is never any use in being angry: that is one of his maxims. Therefore, if he feels any chagrin, he will smother it. If there is a storm within, the world shall see only the rainbow, that radiant smile of his. Cool is Gingerford! ”

“ Consider an average book in that collection: how much human labor does it stand for? How much capital was invested originally in its production, and how much tribute of time and toil does it receive per annum? Regarding books as intellectual estate, how much does it cost mankind to procure and keep up an average specimen? What quantity of human resources has been originally and consecutively sunk in the Parisian library? How much of human time, which is but a span, and of human emotion and thought, which are sacred and not to be carelessly thrown away, lie latent therein? ”

“ On by the lonely farms and unlighted cabins, by the bare, bleak moors, where the night-wind came rolling softly up to look at the travellers,—on till the low, broad sea opened out the view, and came sobbing up on the beach, wailing at its own cruel deeds,—on beneath the cloudless night, upon whose front blazed Orion and the Pleiades,—on until the scene had wrought its charm, and the frequent speech fell to scattered words, to silent thought, to passionate feeling, where swelling heart and dim eyes alone uttered the soul's response to earth's perfect beauty, God's perfect goodness. ”

“ Our libraries are already hardly more than museums, they will soon be mausoleums, while all our reading is of the winged words of the hurried contributor. Some of the most intelligent and influential men in large cities do not read a book once a year. The Cadmean magic has passed from the hands of hierophants into those of the people. Literature has fallen from the domain of immortal thought to that of ephemeral speech, from the conditions of a fine to those of a mechanical art. The order of genius has been abolished by an all-prevailing popular opinion. ”

“ If a man leaves his office or his study to be a soldier, let him be a soldier in earnest. Let those three years bound the horizon of his plans, and let him study his new duty as if earth offered no other conceivable career. The scholar must forswear his pen, the lawyer his books, the politician his arts. An officer of whatever rank, who does not find occupation enough for every day, amid the quietest winter-quarters, in the prescribed duties of his position and the studies to which they should lead, is fitted only for civil pursuits, and had better return to them. ”

“ In his apostolic view, genius alone consecrated literature, and made a literary life sacred. Genius was to him that peculiar and spontaneous devotion to letters which made its possessor indifferent to everything else. For a man without this heavenly stamp to engage in literature was simply for him to rush upon his fate, and become a public nuisance. Literature in its very nature is precarious, and must be plucked from the brink of fate, from the mouth of the dragon. The literary man runs the risk of being destroyed in a thousand ways. ”

“ Why should the wealthy passivity of the Oriental genius be so little known among us? Why conceive of success only as an outward fruit plucked by conscious struggle? Banish books, banish reading, and how much time and strength would be improvised in which to benefit each other! We might become ourselves embodiments of all the truth and beauty and goodness now stagnant in libraries, and might spread their aroma through the social atmosphere. The dynamics would supplant the mechanics of the soul. In the volume of life the literary man knows only the indexes ”

“ The only wonder is that the diabolical invention of Faust or Gutenberg has not already transformed the growths of the mind into a fauna and flora of perdition.
It was a sad barbarism when men ran wild with their own impulses, unable to control the fierceness of instinct. It is a sadder barbarism when men yield to every impulse from without, with no imperial dignity in the soul, which closes the apartments against the violence of the world and frowns away unseemly intruders. We have no spontaneous enthusiasm, no spiritual independence, no inner being, obedient only to its own law. ”

“ If it had been providentially designed that the function of any considerable portion of mankind should have been to write books, we cannot suppose that an economical Deity would have failed to create them with innate skill in language, general knowledge, and penmanship. These accomplishments have to be learned by every writer, yet writers are numberless. They are mysteries which must be painfully encountered by every one at the vestibule of the temple of literature, which nevertheless is thronged. ”

“ No doubt it is a trying ordeal to have some young regular-army lieutenant ride up to your tent at an hour's notice, and leisurely devote a day to probing every weak spot in your command,—to stand by while he smells at every camp-kettle, detects every delinquent gun-sling, ferrets out old shoes from behind the mess-bunks, spies out every tent-pole not labelled with the sergeant's name, asks to see the cash-balance of each company-fund, and perplexes your best captain on forming from two ranks into one by the left flank. ”

“ The libraries, which form dead recesses in the river of life, would thus be swept into and dissolved in the current, and the waters would have been deepened and colored by their dissolution. Libraries are a sort of débris of the world, but the spiritual substance of them would thus enter into the organism of history. All the last results of time would come to us, not through books, but through the impressions of daily life. Whatsoever was unworthy to be woven into the fibres of the soul would be overwhelmed by that oblivion which chases humanity ”