Various

“ No yielding, equivocating, South-by-North politician could ever have brought a lifelong antagonist to stand by his grave and say,—"I believe, that, when the verdict of posterity is recorded on his life and conduct, it will be said of him, that, looking to all he said and did, he was without doubt the greatest political character the pure middle class of this country has yet produced,—an ornament to the House of Commons, and an honor to England." Then arose, as if trying to lift a great burden, noble John Bright. ”

“ He was of the Northwest; and this time it was the Mississippi River, the needed outlet for the wealth of the Northwest, that did its part in asserting the necessity of Union. He was one of the mass of the people; he represented them, because he was of them; and the mass of the people, the class that lives and thrives by self-imposed labor, felt that the work which was to be done was a work of their own: the assertion of equality against the pride of oligarchy; of free labor against the lordship over slaves ”

“ The sleepy city awoke to a new life. Regiments of infantry came pouring in, not only from the hills and valleys of the Old Dominion, but from every nook and corner of the Confederate States,—the Palmetto Guards, Marion Rifles, Jeff-Davis Grays, Whippy-Swamp Grenadiers, Chickasaw Braves, Tigers, Dare-Devils, and Yankee-Butchers,—fired with patriotism and whiskey, proud to be in Richmond, to march through its streets, beneath the flags wrought by the fair ladies of the sunny South, for whom each man had sworn to kill a Yankee! ”

“ The features named make up a captivating girlish beauty, but one which, under a New England atmosphere, is rarely carried forward into womanhood. The lips grow pinched and bloodless; the skin blanched against all proof of blushes; the eyes sunken, and the blithe sparkle that was so full of infectious joy is lost forever in that exhausting blaze of girlhood. But we make no prophecy in regard to the future of our little friend Rose. Adèle thinks her very charming; Reuben is disposed to rank her—whatever Phil may think or say—far above Suke Boody. ”

“ The sun is less racy in all the common garden-stuff whose names we know. Pears and peaches we are disappointed in recognizing; they seem as if ripened by the sun's proxy, the moon; and our boys would hardly pick up the apples in the fields. But England undulates with grass that seems to fix the fluent color of the greenest waves on either hand. And our eagle-eyed blue sky droops its lid over the island, as the moisture gathers, with a more equable compassion than we know for all shrubs and blades and grazing cattle. ”

“ You walk about among these slow, good-natured men, with plump boys' faces and men's chests, and hear them speak your language without your sense. They have a limited one, like their monarchy. How admirably it keeps the square miles of their own island! how shockingly it tends the acres of Ireland! how haughtily it ignored and trampled upon the instincts of the Hindoo! how unwilling it is to see a difference between the circumstances of Australia and those of England! How it blundered into a neutrality which was a recognition of infamy! ”

“ Ten thousand times ten thousand voices sound the notes of preparation. Everywhere there is hurrying and scurrying. Every tiny, sleeping germ of animal and vegetable life springs to its feet, wide awake, and girded for the race. Now you must be wide awake too, or you will be ignominiously left behind among the baggage.
The time of the singing of birds is come, and the time of the cackling of homely, honest barn-yard fowls, who have never had justice done them. Why do we extol foreign growths and neglect the children of the soil? Where is there a more magnificent bird than the Rooster? ”

“ A human mother loves her children, but she is restrained by a sense of propriety from tearing other mothers' children in pieces. A hen has no such checks; her motherhood exists without any qualification. Her intense love for her own brood is softened by no social requirements. If a poor lost waif from another coop strays into her realm, no pity, no sympathy springing from the memory of her own offspring, moves her to kindness ”

“ The thousands who have come and gone through Harper's Ferry and past Bolivar Heights will recall the waste and desolation of what was once a blooming garden-spot, full of thrift and industry and comfort almost unknown elsewhere south of the fatal slave-line; thousands who are yet to pass that way will see in the ruins of the place traces of the avenging spirit that has marked forever the scene of John Brown's Raid. ”

“ Regnard sat to himself for the portrait of Valère. The wild and fascinating excitement of play, the gambler's exultation when he is successful, his furious curses on his bad luck when he loses, his superstitious veneration for his winnings, are drawn from the life. When Fortune smiles, Valère neglects Angélique, his rich fiancée; when he is penniless, his love revives, and he is at her feet until his valet devises some new plan of raising money. ”

“ It is very odd how happy people can be, when they are as poor as poverty, and don't know where to look for their living but to the work of their own hands. Genteel poverty is horrible; it is impossible for one to be poor, and elegant, and comfortable; but downright, simple, unblushing poverty may be the most blessed of states; and though it was somewhat of a descent in the social scale for Dely to marry a farm-hand, foreman though he might be, she loved her George so devoutly and healthily that she was as happy as a woman could be. ”

“ And what a futurity is opened before the country when its institutions become homogeneous! From all the civilized world the nations will send hosts to share the wealth and glory of this people. It will receive all good ideas from abroad; and its great principles of personal equality and freedom—freedom of conscience and mind,—freedom of speech and action,—freedom of government through ever-renewed common consent—will undulate through the world like the rays of light and heat from the sun. ”

“ George was a brave fellow, no doubt, and would do good service to his free country; but it is a question with me, whether, when the Lord calls out his "noble army of martyrs" before the universe of men and angels, that army will not be found officered and led by just such women as these, who fought silently with the flesh and the Devil by their own hearth, quickened by no stinging excitement of battle, no thrill of splendid strength and fury in soul and body, no tempting delight of honor or even recognition from their peers,—upheld only by the dull, recurrent necessities of duty and love. ”

“ How could they believe any man from a Northern city innocent of a knowledge of the plot now bursting about their ears? Would not my travelling-companions from the same latitude be ready to help free the slaves? and if I was set at liberty, would it not be only too easy to communicate between the little host already beleaguered in the armory engine-house and the mythical great host that was gathered in the North and ready to pour itself over the South? ”

“ The rhythm of the living column is the march of England's steady justice into coal-mines and factories, Church and State.
For this reason we ought to cultivate pacific relations with the Government of England. Beware lest the question of the Alabama break loose to prey upon the true commerce of mankind! A war would put back the people of England for fifty years. When England is at war, the people are apt to rally to the Government. The island is so small, that, when a feeling once gets started, it sweeps all men away into an inconsiderate and almost savage support of the public honor. ”

“ But, again, a bustling, pickling, preserving, stocking-knitting, universal-housekeeping woman has a daughter who dreams over her knitting-work and hides a book under her sampler,—whose thoughts are straying in Greece, Rome, Germany,—who is reading, studying, thinking, writing, without knowing why; and the mother sets herself to fight this nature, and to make the dreamy scholar into a driving, thorough-going, exact woman-of-business. ”

“ But Spring in the country,—O season rightly named!—a goddess-queen glides through the heavens and the earth, and all that is therein springs up to meet her and do obeisance. We, gross and heavy, blind and deaf, are slow to catch the flutter of her robes, the music of her footfall, the odor of her breath; the shine of her far-off coming. We call it cold and Winter still. We huddle about the fires and wonder if the Spring will never come ”

“ Our libraries are not large enough to hold the mob of authors who press in. What with newspapers, magazines, and the last new novel, few persons have time to read more than the titles on the backs of their books. They are familiar with the great names, take their excellence on trust, and allow them to stand neglected and dusty on their shelves. But with another generation the great names will become mere shadows of a name ”

“ Him I tended through dreary days of east wind and rain in a box on the mantel-piece, nursing him through a severe attack of asthma, feeding and amusing him through his protracted convalescence, holding him in my hand one whole Sunday afternoon to relieve him of home-sickness and hen-sickness, and being rewarded at last by seeing animation and activity come back to his poor sickly little body. He will never be a robust chicken. ”

“ Nothing can be more ludicrous than their early efforts to walk. They do not really walk. They sight their object, waver, balance, decide, and then tumble forward, stopping all in a heap as soon as the original impetus is lost, generally some way ahead of the place to which they wished to go. It is delightful to watch them as drowsiness films their round, bright, black eyes, and the dear old mother croons them under her ample wings, and they nestle in perfect harmony. ”

“ Is it fair, after he has got her, to compare her housekeeping, and her efficiency and capability in the material part of life, with those of his mother and sisters, who are strong-limbed, practical women, that have never thought about anything but housekeeping from their cradle? Shall he all the while vex himself and her with the remembrance of how his mother used to get up at five o'clock and arrange all the business of the day,—how she kept all the accounts,—how she saw to everything and settled everything,—how there never were break-downs or irregularities in her system? ”

“ If an observer knows anything of the history of England, he cannot deny that vast changes have been made in every department of life: domestic habits, social economics, the courts of law, the Church, the liberty of the press and of speech, in short, all the roads, whether material or mental, by which mankind travels to its ultimate purpose, have been graded, widened, solidly equipped and built. ”

“ Like the poet, she looks not forward nor behind. If they are beyond reach, very well; if they are not, all the same; scratch, scratch, scratch in the soil goes her great, strong, horny claw, and up flies a cloud of dust, and away goes a poor unfortunate, whirling involuntary somersets through the air without the least warning. She is a living monument of the mischief that may be done by giving undue prominence to one idea. ”

“ You have noticed a machine clutch its raw material and twist and turn it through its relentless bowels. That is the way the habits of England seize you when you land, and begin to appropriate your personality. This is the first offence of England in the eyes of an American, whose favorite phrase, "the largest liberty," is too synonymous with the absence of any settled habits. Prescribed ways of doing everything are the scum which a traveller first gathers in England. ”

“ The Englishman says that America is forever bullying with her restlessness and innovation. The American might at first say that England bullied by never budging,—bullied the future, and every rational or humane suggestion, by planting a portly attitude to challenge the New Jerusalem in an overbearing chest voice, through which the timid clarion of the angels is not heard. ”

“ The weaver of Lancashire, who plays out his hunger in London streets, and our seamen who make the weaver wait while they watch three thousand miles of seaboard, are both listening to the rote of the same great truth, as it dashes on the shores of Time, and brings bracing air to the people who are sick with waiting. ”

“ The doom is universal; it cannot be avoided. There must be an end to all temporal things, and why not to books? The same endless night awaits a Plato and a penny-a-liner. Our Eternities of Fame, like all else appertaining to humanity, will some day pass away. Even Milton and Shakspeare, our great staple international poets, who have been brought out whenever the American ambassador to England dined in public, are travelling the same downward path. How many of us, man or woman, on the sunny side of thirty, have gone through the "Paradise Lost"? ”

“ You have scarcely learned the way to their nook above the great beam when it is abandoned, and they betake themselves to a hole at the very bottom of the haystack. I wish I could tell you a story about a Hebrew prophet crawling under a barn after hen's eggs, and crawling out again from the musty darkness into sweet light with his clothes full of cobwebs, his eyes full of dust, his hands full of eggs, to find himself winking and blinking in the midst of a party of ladies and gentlemen who had come lion-hunting from a farre countrie. ”

“ If one resolve to remain single,—and it must require strength of mind to come to this determination,—it is remarkable how Nature fits such a woman for a position for which she could not have been created. She takes her stand with a power of endurance not exceeded by that of the other sex, and becomes more independent and at ease than they. Let man's condition be what it may, whether rich or poor, he will find his home cheerless and uncomfortable without the presence of a woman. His desolateness at an hotel or boarding-house is proverbial. ”

“ A thousand years have converted three or four races into one people,—and all that time and weather have made upon it such strong imprints that you cannot see the difference between a pyramid and a cathedral sooner than you can the distinctive nationality of England. ”

“ Well might Gladstone say of him, as he did,—"Rare is the privilege of any man who, having fourteen years ago rendered to his country one signal and splendid service, now again, within the same brief span of life, decorated neither by rank nor title, bearing no mark to distinguish him from the people whom he loves, has been permitted to perform a great and memorable service to his sovereign and to his country." ”

“ But their faces shine when the discourse moralizes; it seems to take them by the button, so friendly it is,—but it looks them closely in the eye, without heat and distant zeal, with great, manly expostulation, rather, and half-humorous argument, that sometimes make the tears stand upon the lids. The florid countenances become a shade paler with listening, the dark complexions glow with a brooding religiosity. It is plain that he has a hungry people, and feeds them with what suits their frames the best. ”

“ You cannot make a Tory understand that powers are derived from the consent of the governed, and that the consent is itself an institution. "What becomes of State rights?" he asks. And when you reply, that the concentred function of each State is contained within a diffused popular will whose centre is at Washington, and that thirty-four concentrations of this kind are nothing more than thirty-four general conveniences, he takes you slowly by the button, looks pityingly in your face, and says, "That is a Northern crotchet, which this civil war has come to cure," and then he leaves you. ”

“ Holyoake, who is one of the most vigorous champions of free thought and popular rights in England, says,—"Revolution is no longer necessary in English politics. Our wise and noble forefathers, of those old times of which modern radicals in many towns know too little, laid broad foundations of freedom in our midst. It only needs that we build upon these, and the English educated classes, who always move in the grooves of precedent, will acquiesce with a reasonable readiness." ”

“ An administration appears to an Englishman to be the country; he has not yet heard an authoritative interpretation of republicanism, for a Washington cabinet has not till lately spoken the mind of the common people. But when he understands us better he will dread us all the more, because the people in all countries speak the same language in expressing the same wants; and when universal suffrage puts universal justice on its throne in America, injustice will everywhere uneasily await the ballot which shall place it in the minority. ”

“ On all the roads were men, women, and children, in carriages of every description, with multitudes on horseback and on foot, fleeing from the Rebel capital. Men who could not get away were secretly at work, during those night-hours, burying plate and money in gardens; ladies secreted their jewels, barred and bolted their doors, and passed a sleepless night, fearful of the morrow, which would bring the hated, despised, Vandal horde of Yankee ruffians: for such were the epithets which they had persistently applied to the soldiers of the Union throughout the war. ”