Various

“ I must not dwell on any other alternative, any more than a boy who climbs a precipice must look down. Imagination had no business here. That way madness lay. There was a shore somewhere before me, and I must get to it, by the ordinary means, before the ebb laid bare the flats, or swept me below the lower bends of the stream. That was all.
Suddenly a light gleamed for an instant before me, as if from a house in a grove of great trees upon a bank; and I knew that it came from the window of a ruined plantation-building, where our most advanced outposts had their head-quarters. ”

“ The broad, unequivocal sentence of history seems to be that whoever is not noble by nature will hardly be rendered so by art. Education can do much; it can foster nobilities, it can discourage vices; but literal conveyance of lofty qualities, can it effect that? Can it create opulence of soul in a sterile nature? Can it cause a thin soil to do the work of a deep one? We have seen harsh natures mellowed, violent natures chastened, rough ones refined; but who has seen an essentially mean nature made large-hearted, self-forgetful, fertile of grandest faiths and greatest deeds? ”

“ Madame Lenormant, even more enthusiastic, calls her a saint, which she certainly was not, but a gracious woman of the world. Some acts of her life it is impossible to defend. They tarnish the lustre of an otherwise irreproachable career. Still, when we think of the low tone of morals prevalent in her youth, together with her many and great temptations, it is surprising that she should have preserved her purity of heart, and earned the respect and love of the best and wisest of her contemporaries. No woman has ever received more universal and uniform homage, or has been more deeply lamented. ”

“ Let each, then, bring up out of his own soul its purest, broadest, simplest faith; and when any ten or ten thousand find that the same faith has come to birth in their several souls, each one of them all will be exalted to a divine confidence, and will make new requisitions upon the soul which he has so been taught to trust. Thus, though we tell each nothing new, though we merely demonstrate our unity of consciousness, yet is the force of each many times multiplied,—dimless certitude and dauntless courage being bred in hearts where before, perhaps, were timorous hesitation and wavering. ”

“ They who would seek in their foolish pride to establish the pomp of liveried servants in America are doing that which is simply absurd. A servant can never in our country be the mere appendage to another man, to be marked like a sheep with the color of his owner; he must be a fellow-citizen, with an established position of his own, free to make contracts, free to come and go, and having in his sphere titles to consideration and respect just as definite as those of any trade or profession whatever. ”

“ All ideas of truth dwell in every soul, but in every soul they are at first wrapped in deep sleep, in an infinite depth of sleep; while the base incense of brutish lives is like chloroform, or the fumes of some benumbing drug, to steep them ever more and more in oblivion. But to awaken truth thus sleeping in the soul is the highest use of discipline, the noblest aim of culture, and the most eminent service which man can render to man. ”

“ I found there, in place of the late kind host and hostess, a crowd—so they seemed to me—of rude and coarse-minded people; and I saw the hateful red flag of the auctioneer hanging over the door.
An eagle in a dove-cot, a fox in a barn-yard, a wolf among sheep, is mild, merciful, and humane, when compared with the flock of human vultures that had invaded this once happy residence, and were greedily stripping it of all that the taste and the wealth of its late occupants had furnished it with. ”

“ There never was an act of development in any man's soul that did not imply a humanity, and involve the virtue of social affinity. I should be dumb, but for the ears of others; I should be deaf, that is, my human ear would be closed, but for human voices; and there is no particle of human energy, and no tint of human coloring, for which we are not, in part, indebted to vital human fellowship. Nevertheless, of this experience, though in the absence of social connection it could not have occurred, not one jot nor tittle can be made over to another by means of words. ”

“ The image-boy interested her; he was a visible creature of those foreign fairy-shores of which she had dreamed; that she did anything but show kindness to a vagrant whom she would not see again never crossed her mind; perhaps, too, she liked that Italy, in his person, should admire her,—that was pardonable. But, at the action, the shadow swept away from the boy's face again, all his lights and darks came flashing out, eyes and teeth and color sparkling in his smile, like sunshine after rain; he made his low obeisance, poised the tray upon his head, and, with a wave of his hand, went out. ”

“ She had received the gift of fascination at her birth: and can a woman be fascinating who has not a touch of coquetry? It was as natural in Madame Récamier to charm as it was to breathe. It was a necessity of her nature, which her unnatural position developed and fostered to a reprehensible extent. But while she permitted herself to be loved, and rejoiced in the consciousness of this power, she never carried her flirtations so far as to lose her own self-respect or the respect of her admirers. ”

“ Therefore, in the midst of all warmest and quickest verity of social nearness, there is a kind of sacred and inviolable solitude of the soul. We speak across to each other, as out of different planets in heaven; and the closest intimacy of souls is like that of double stars which revolve about each other, not like that of two lumps of clay which are squeezed and confounded together.
So much, then, concerning the limits of verbal communication. Words, we say, are not vehicles. No perception, no mental possession, passes from mind to mind. ”

“ Let him, therefore, in whom any great truth is alive and awake, enunciate, proclaim it steadily, clearly, cheerily, with a serene and cloudless passion; and wherever a soul less mature than his own lies open to the access of his tones, there the eye-fast angels of belief and knowledge shall hear that publication of their own hearts, and, hearing, lift their lids, and rise into wakefulness and power. ”

“ He is the exile of a noble family,—no other beggar would be so haughty," looked up and answered Eve, laughing between her bars. "Mamma, what different beings different meridians make!" she exclaimed, dropping her music. "Is he so sweet and lofty and fiery because he has lived in the shadow of old temples,—because, if he stumbled over a pebble in the street, it was the marble fragment of a goddess,—because the clay of which he is made has so many times been moulded into heroes?" ”

“ More of the highest life is suppressed in every one of us than ever gets vent; and it is this inward suppression, after making due account of all outward oppressions and injuries, which constitutes the chief tragedy of history. Daily men cast to the ground the proffered beakers of heaven, from mere fear to drink. Daily they rebuke the divine, inarticulate murmur that arises from the deeps of their being,—inarticulate only because denied and reproved. And he is greatest who can meet with a certain pure intrepidity those suggestions which haunt forever the hearts of men. ”

“ Ingrates that we are, are we to be thankful for no benefits that are not palpable to sense, to recognize no favors that are not of marketable value, to acknowledge no wealth unless it can be counted with the five fingers? If we admit the mind to be the sole depositary of genuine joy, where is the bosom that has not been elevated into a temporary Elysium by the magic of the Lottery? ”

“ What my own soul, fed from the vital resources and incited by the vital relationships of my life, has learned of love, that my thought may connect with the word; but of all this nothing passes when it is uttered; and the sound, arriving at your ear, can do no more than invite you to summon and bring before the eye of your consciousness that which your own soul, out of its divine depths and through the instruction of vital relationship, has learned and has privily whispered to you of this sacred mystery, love. ”

“ For deep feeling has a potency of its own, and all that careless group felt as if some deific cloud had passed by.
As for Eve, what coquetry there was in her nature was but the innocent coruscation of happy spirits, the desire to see her power, the necessity of being dear to all she touched. Far from pleasant was this vehemence of devotion; the approach of it oppressed her; she comprehended Luigi as a creature of another species, another race, than herself ”

“ The scheme of our life is providentially arranged with reference to that end; and the thousand shocks, agitations, and moving influences of our experience, the supreme invitations of love, the venom of calumny, and all toil, trial, sudden bereavement, doubt, danger, vicissitude, joy, are hands that shake and voices that assail the lethargy of our deepest powers. Now it is in the power of truth divinely awakened in one soul to assist its awakening in another. ”

“ It is the style of the book, however, to which one must revert with admiration, not unmingled with criticism, and, it may be, a trifle of just indignation. There are not ten living writers in America of whom it can be said that their style is in itself a charm,—that it has the range, the flexibility, the delicacy, the ease, the strength, which constitute permanent power,—that it is so saturated with life, with literary allusion, with the symbolism of Nature, as to make us dwell on the mere sentences with delight, apart from all thought of argument or theme. This it is to be a literary artist ”

“ She had closed the last of her receptacles, and, dismissing the matter, for want of better employment, her scissors were tinkering upon a tiny hand-glass with a setting thickly crusted in crystals, a trifle that one clear day a sailor diving from her father's ship had found upon the bottom of the sea,—a very mermaid's glass dropped in some shallow place for Eve herself, a glass that had reflected the rushing of the storm, the sliding of the keel above, the face of many a drowning mariner. ”

“ As there is nothing in the history of the French Revolution that should make reflecting men averse to constitutional liberty, so is there nothing in the history of our war that should cause such men to become hostile to that democratic idea which, as great observers assure us, is to overcome and govern the world.
If we have failed, if our conflict is destined to end in a "general break-down," so unhappy a close to a grand movement will not be due to the ascendency of democracy here, but rather to democracy having by us been kept down and depressed. ”

“ And had she been a person of strong convictions, she would never have been so universally popular. As it was, she pleased equally persons of every shade of opinion and principle. Her instinctive coquetry can partly account for her sway over men, but not over women. What, then, was the secret of her influence? It lay in the subtile power of a marvellous tact. This tact had its roots deep in her nature. It was part and parcel of herself, the distinguishing trait in a rare combination of qualities. Though nurtured and ripened by experience, it was not the offspring of art. ”

“ On the other hand, no poet has so planted our literature with gorgeous gardens from which generations of lesser laborers will be enriched and prospered. The figures in which Tennyson uses Nature are not, moreover, strained or artificial; they do not distort or cover the inner meaning, but bloom from it, revealing its beauty and its sweetness. All bear the mark of loving thought,—now so delicate that its very faintness thrills and holds us, now strong and spirited and solemn. ”

“ It never occurred to her that such bread and biscuit as she saw at the home-table would not always and of course appear at every table,—that the silver would not always be as bright, the glass as clear, the salt as fine and smooth, the plates and dishes as nicely arranged as she had always seen them, apparently without the thought or care of any one,—for my wife is one of those housekeepers whose touch is so fine that no one feels it. She is never heard scolding or reproving,—never entertains her company with her recipes for cookery or the faults of her servants. ”

“ Instantly is suggested a unity underlying our divided being, a law of thought abiding in mind itself,—not merely in your mind or mine, but in the mind and soul of man. What we arrive at, therefore, is not merely the sum of you and me, the aggregate of two men's opinions, but the universal, the absolute, and spiritually necessary. Such is always the suggestion which spontaneous unity of faith carries with it ”

“ As I drew near the opposite shore, the dark causeway projected more and more distinctly, to my fancy at least, and I swam more softly still, utterly uncertain as to how far, in the stillness of air and water, my phosphorescent course could be traced by eye or ear. A slight ripple would have saved me from observation, I was more than ever sure, and I would have whistled for a fair wind as eagerly as any sailor, but that my breath was worth more than anything it was likely to bring. ”