Various

“ She might say,—"Well, dear, you shall always have your salad as you like"; and he might say,—"My dear, I will try to like your salad, if you care much about it"; and if either of them would utter one of these sentences, the other would soon follow. Either would give up, if the other would set the example; but as it is, they remind us of nothing so much as two cows that we have seen standing with locked horns in a meadow, who can neither advance nor recede an inch. It is a mere deadlock of the animal instinct of firmness; reason, conscience, religion have nothing to do with it. ”

“ Kept below much of the time by inclement weather, we are crowded and jumbled incessantly together; you jostle against the shoulders of one, you rub elbows with another, you clamber over the knees of a third; the members of the company are thrust together more closely than husband and wife in the narrowest household, and there is no exhaustless spousal love, no nameless mutual charm of man and woman, to relieve the sharpness of contact. Every man's peculiarities come out; and as there is no space between one and another, every man's peculiarities jar upon those of his neighbor. ”

“ But all days yield to those of Labrador when the better genius of its climate prevails. Then one feels the serenity of power, then all his blood is exalted and pure, and the globules sail through his veins like rich argosies before trade-winds. Then an irritable haste and a weak lassitude are alike impossible; one's nerves are made of a metal finer than steel, and he becomes truly a lord in Nature. ”

“ In large numbers they scour the fields and groves. You hear their piping in the meadow, in the pasture, on the hillside. Walk in the woods, and the dry leaves rustle with the whir of their wings, the air is vocal with their cheery call. In excess of joy and vivacity, they run, leap, scream, chase each other through the air, diving and sweeping among the trees with perilous rapidity.
In that free, fascinating, half-work and half-play pursuit,—sugar-making,—a pursuit which still lingers in many parts of New York, as in New England, the Robin is one's boon companion. ”

“ Passing into its tranquil scenes from the quiet of home and the hands of a private tutor, with the sunny hopes and high ideal and scanty experience of youth, much that I found there appeared to me at the time but natural and in the ordinary course of things, which now, by the light of a life's teachings, and by comparison with the realities as I have found them, seems to me, as I look back, rather in the nature of a dream of fancy, tinged with the glamour of optimism, than like the things one really meets with in the work-a-day world. ”

“ That very evening Sabrina quitted her employment at the factory, and was taken to her father's house, acknowledged as his child, her future to be made by him as cloudless as in the past his own shameless neglect had caused it to be gloomy.
If in such a refuge as this factory there were gathered many examples of the ups and downs of life, it was a blessing that such an establishment existed. Here was a certainty of employment at wages on which a woman could live. But, generally, such factories accommodated only what might be called the better order of workers,—that is, the least necessitous. ”

“ To secure the alliance of the Colonies, France would have been compelled to take upon herself the burden of the war; a French general might have led our armies; French gold might have paid our troops; we might have been spared the sufferings of Valley Forge, the humiliation of bankruptcy; but where would have been the wise discipline of adversity? and if great examples be as essential to the formation of national as of individual character, what would the name of independence have been to us, without the example of our Washington? ”

“ A principle can be discussed; a fact is undeniable. Although refracted by the organs of the foreign press, the light of truth still flashed at times upon the people in Europe, and taught it to reflect. When our troubles broke out, I was in Martinique. In all the Antilles,—Spanish, French, Danish, English, Swedish, Dutch,—it was but one unanimous cry, "Did not we say so?" and the truthful and independent correspondents immediately embraced this opportunity to redouble their zeal, and forthwith began to multiply like mosquitoes in a tropical swamp after a summer shower. ”

“ Sound and odor are no more native to the air than is the Swallow. Look at this marvellous creature! He can reverse the order of the seasons, and almost keep the morning or the sunset constantly in his eye, or outstrip the west-wind cloud. Does he subsist upon air or odor, that he is forever upon the wing, and never deigns to pick a seed or crumb from the earth? Is he an embodied thought projected from the brain of some mad poet in the dim past, and sent to teach us a higher geometry of curves and spirals? ”

“ Public opinion, speaking through the press by eloquent pens, through coffee-houses and saloons by eloquent voices, called loudly for action in the name of humanity and in the still more exciting name of French honor. Little as most Frenchmen knew about America, they knew enough about England to believe that in her disputes with other nations she was apt to be in the wrong,—and if with other nations, why not with her own colonies? ”

“ With the sharp contrast of a dream came the old clam-digger, barefoot in the mud, her basket of soiled clothes on her shoulder,—her son Derrick, a vulgar lad, aping gentility, behind her. Closer and closer came the waters; a shark's gray hide glittered a few feet from him. Death, [Pg 546] sure of his prey, nibbled and played with it; in a little while he lay supine and unconscious.
Reason came back to him like an electric shock; for all the parts of Dr. Birkenshead's organization were instinctive, nervous, like a woman's. ”

“ She never heard of going to housekeeping in anything but a nice little pendulous bag swinging down from under the branches of a breezy elm; he is sure he should have water on the brain before summer was over, from constant vertigo, in such swaying, unsteady quarters,—he would be a sea-sick blue-jay on land, and he cannot think of it. She knows now he don't love her, or he never would think of shutting her up in an old mouldy hole picked out of rotten wood ”

“ Such a spectacle, I suppose, one might chance to see anywhere, though the chance certainly never occurred to me before. It could scarcely have escaped me through want of attention, for I could well believe myself a child of the sun, so deep an appeal to my feeling is made by effects of light and color: light before all.
But the atmosphere of Labrador has its own secret of beauty, and charms the eye with aspects which one may be pardoned for believing incomparable in their way. ”

“ But the crowning glory of all these Robins, Flycatchers, and Warblers is the Wood-Thrush. More abundant than all other birds, except the Robin and Cat-Bird, he greets you from every rock and shrub. Shy and reserved when he first makes his appearance in May, before the end of June he is tame and familiar, and sings on the tree over your head, or on the rock a few paces in advance. A pair even built their nest and reared their brood within ten or twelve feet of the piazza of a large summer-house in the vicinity. ”

“ It is said that Lord Eldon, the typical conservative of his day, shed tears of sincere regret on the abolition of the death-penalty for five-shilling thefts. The unfortunate Lord Eldons of our own day must be weeping in rivers. Slavery is dead, and the freedmen are its bequest. Through a Red Sea which no one would have dared to contemplate, we have attained to the Promised Land. By the sublimest revenge which history has placed on record, we have returned good for evil, and have punished those who wronged us by requiring them to cease from doing wrong. ”

“ The adoption by such a power of the cause of a people so obscure as the people of the "Thirteen Colonies" then were was, in the opinion of European statesmen, decisive of its success. The fact of our actual poverty was known to all; few, if any, knew that we possessed exhaustless sources of wealth. Our weakness was on the surface, palpable, manifest, forcing itself upon attention; our strength lay out of sight, in rich veins which none but eyes familiar with their secret windings could trace. ”

“ And now, up those marble stairs, through those tapestried halls, came three men of humble birth, two of whom had wrought for their daily bread and eaten it in the sweat of their brows, to receive their recognition as the representatives of a power which had taken its place among the nations, not by virtue of the divine right of kings, but in the name of the inalienable rights of the people. ”

“ Beecher is like walking over an ancient battle-field, silent and grass-grown, but ridged with graves, and showing still by its conformation the disposition of the troops which once struggled there in deadly contest,—and while we linger, lo! the graves are graves no more. The dry bones come together,—sinew and flesh form upon them,—the skin covers them about,—the breath enters into them,—they live and stand upon their feet, an exceeding great and mighty army. ”

“ Often you will catch only one or two of the bars, the breeze having blown the minor part away. Such unambitious, quiet, unconscious melody! It is one of the most characteristic sounds in Nature. The grass, the stones, the stubble, the furrow, the quiet herds, and the warm twilight among the hills are all subtilely expressed in this song; this is what they are at last capable of.
The female builds a plain nest in the open field, without so much as a bush or thistle or tuft of grass to protect it or mark its site; you may step upon it, or the cattle may tread it into the ground. ”

“ The longing for revenge, which ever since the Treaty of Paris filled some corner of every French heart, grew stronger at the near approach of so abundant a harvest; nor did it lose any of its sweetness from the reflection that their enemy himself was doing what they never could have done alone to prepare it for them.
But humanity, too, was a powerful word. Men could not read Rousseau without being led to think more earnestly, if not always more profoundly, upon the laws of social organization. ”

“ The two great battle-poems begin, each of them, with beautiful descriptive lines, move on with gradually kindling fire, reach the highest intensity of action, till the words themselves have the weight and the rush of shot and shell, and the verses seem aflame with the passion of the conflict,—then, as the strife calms itself after the victory is won, the wild dithyrambic stanzas rock themselves into sweet, even cadences. No one can fail to be struck with the freedom and robustness of the language, the irregular strength of the rhythm, the audacious felicities of the rhyme. ”

“ Doctor Bowdler looked uncomfortable.
"A selfish French Philister, La Rochefoucauld!" he blurted out. "I feel as if I had been steeped in meanness and vulgarity all my life, when I read him."
"He knew men," said the other, coolly, resetting a pocket set of chessmen on the board where they had been playing,—"Frenchmen," shortly.
"Doctor Birkenshead," after a pause, "you appear to have no sympathies with either side, in this struggle for the nation's life. You neither attack nor defend our government." ”

“ His justly tempered faculties lost none of their serene activity or gentle philanthropy by age. Hamilton himself, at thirty, did not labor with more earnestness in the formation of the Constitution than Franklin at eighty-one; and as if in solemn record of his own interpretation of it, his last public act, with eternity full in view, was to head a memorial to Congress for the abolition of the slave-trade.
That such a man should produce a strong impression upon the excitable mind of France must be evident to every one who knows how excitable that mind is. ”

“ I understand the enthusiasm of Wilson and Audubon, and see how one might forsake house and home and go and live with them the free life of the woods.
To the dissecting, classifying scientist a bird may be no more perfect or lovable than a squirrel or a fish; yet to me it seems that all the excellences of the animal creation converge and centre in this nymph of the air; a warbler seems to be the finishing stroke. ”

“ I had turned away, and was debating with myself whether some such color, seen on the Scotch and English hills, had not given the hint for those uniform browns which Turner in his youth copied from his earlier masters. When I looked back, the sunshine had flooded the mountain, and was bathing it all in the purest rose-red. Bathing it? No, the mountain was solidly converted, transformed to that hue! The power, the simplicity, the translucent, shining depth of the color were all that you can imagine, if you make no abatements, and task your imagination to the utmost. ”

“ A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the unwatched instinct of self-will, and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship.
Everyman and every woman, in their self-training and self-culture, should study the art of giving up with a good grace. The charm of polite society is formed by that sort of freedom and facility in all the members of a circle which makes each one pliable to the influences of the others, and sympathetic to slide into the moods and tastes of others without a jar. ”

“ What a noble pride he has! Late one October, after his mates and companions had long since gone South, I noticed one for several successive days in the dense part of this next-door wood, flitting noiselessly about, very grave and silent, as if doing penance for some violation of the code of honor. By many gentle, indirect approaches, I perceived that part of his tail-feathers were undeveloped. The sylvan prince could not think of returning to court in this plight,—and so, amid the falling leaves and cold rains of autumn, was patiently biding his time. ”

“ Even Vergennes, who knew that his coming was the signal of a new favor to be asked, found in his way of asking it such a cheerful recognition of its true character, so considerate an exposition of the necessities which made it urgent, that he never saw him come without pleasure. If he had been a vain man, he would have enjoyed his position too much to make good use of it for the cause he came to serve. If he had been a weak man, he would have fallen under the control of the opinion which it was his office to guide. ”

“ I look for a wife of a gentle and yielding nature, that shall take her opinions from me, and accommodate her tastes to mine." And so Don Positive goes and marries a pretty little pink-and-white concern, so lisping and soft and delicate that he is quite sure she cannot have a will of her own. She is the moon of his heavens, to shine only by his reflected light.
We would advise our gentlemen friends who wish to enjoy the felicity of having their own way not to try the experiment with a pretty fool; for the obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity. ”