Various

“ And first, it is important we should bear in mind, that, in this misdirection of youth, all that constitutes the spirit, the power, the charm of youth is extinguished. The young man becomes prematurely old. We have all witnessed that saddest of spectacles, the petulant child developing into the ruffian boy, and hurrying into the ruffian man,—rude, hard-natured, swaggering, and self-willed, a darkness over his conscience, a glare over his appetites, insensible to duty or affection, and only tamed into decencies by the chains of restraint which an outraged community binds on his impulses. ”

“ Petulant, passionate, self-willed, impatient of all external direction, the slave and victim of the moment's impulse, yet full of the energies and visions of genius, this arrogant stripling passes by quick leaps from boyhood into the vices of age, and, after a short experience of the worst side of life, comes out a scoffer and a misanthrope, fills the world with his gospel of desperation and despair, and, after preaching disgust of existence and contempt of mankind as the wisdom gleaned from his excesses, he dies, worn out and old, at thirty-six. ”

“ But this self-deified genius, who could find nothing on our planet capable of withstanding his power, was mortal, and died, by what seemed mere accident, at the age of thirty-two,—died, the master of an empire, conquered by himself, covering two millions and a half of square miles,—died, in the full vigor of his faculties, at the time his brain was teeming with magnificent schemes of assimilating the populations of Europe and Asia, and of remaking man after his own image by stamping the nature of Alexander on the mind and feelings of the world. ”

“ More fit for a madhouse than a throne, his advent is the signal of a despotism controlled by no guiding principles, but given over to that spirit of freak and mischief which springs from the union of the boy's brain with the man's appetites; and his fate is to have that craze of the faculties and delirium of the sensations which he calls his life abruptly closed by suicide or assassination: by suicide, when he has become intolerable to himself; by assassination, when, as is more common, he has become intolerable to the world. ”

“ Does not this question point to Him who is the central Person and Power of the past eighteen hundred years of history?—to Him who will be the central Person and Power of the whole future of history?—to Him who came into the world in the form of a young man, and whom a young man announced, crying in the wilderness?—to Him who clasps in his thought and in his love the whole humanity whose troubled annals history recounts, and who divinized the spirit of youth when He assumed its form? ”

“ She knew they were to camp at Piedmont, and to follow them up, for they had but a day's start of me. It was quite clear day before our turn came to cross the ferry, and then we had to wait for hours on the other side. When I came out of the ferry-house, I put my foot on the grass, and I thought, 'This is Virginia!' It was as if I had stepped on some place where a murder had been done. I was as silly as a half-witted person," blushing apologetically. "I have had great kindness done to me in Virginia since then." ”

“ How those people do who live in the nearest and dearest intimacy with friends who they believe will lie to them for any purpose, even the most refined and delicate, is a mystery to me. If I once know that my wife or my friend will tell me only what they think will be agreeable to me, then I am at once lost, my way is a pathless quicksand. But all this being premised, I still say that we Anglo-Saxons might improve our domestic life, if we would graft upon the strong stock of its homely sincerity the courteous graces of the French character. ”

“ When the vernal equinox came, and we could sit down to dinner at sunset, the spell of death seemed to be at last broken. The fashionable drive, of an afternoon, changed from the Nevskoi Prospekt to the Palace Quay on the Neva; the Summer Garden was cleared of snow, and its statues one by one unboxed; in fine days we could walk there, and there coax back the faded color to a child's face. There, too, walked Alexander II., one of the crowd, leading his little daughter by the hand; and thither, in a plain little calèche, drove the Empress, with her youngest baby on her lap. ”

“ Soon the Texan's escape is known at the camp, and a great hue-and-cry follows. Handbills are got out, a reward is offered, and by that Sunday noon his name is on every street-corner. Squads of soldiers and police ransack the city and invade every Rebel asylum. Strange things are brought to light, and strange gentry dragged out of dark closets; but nowhere is found the Texan. The search is well done, for the pursuers are in dead earnest; and, Captain Hines, if you don't trust him now, you are a fool, with all your astuteness! ”

“ When the civilization of the country prepared to engage in a death-grapple with its barbarism,—when the most beneficent of all governments was threatened by the basest of all conspiracies, the most infamous of all treasons, the most thievish [Pg 8] of all rebellions,—and when that government was sustained by the most glorious uprising that ever surged up from the heart of a great people to defend the cause of liberty and honesty and law,—did not the hot tide of that universal patriotism sparkle and seethe and glow with special intensity in the breasts of our young men? ”

“ The heart of a nation may be eaten out by this process, without its losing any external signs of prosperity and strength; but the process itself is resisted, and the nation kept alive and impelled forward, by the purifying, though disturbing forces, which come from the generous sentiments and fervid aspirations of youth. Wise old heads may sneer as much as they please at the idea of heart in politics; but if history teaches anything, it teaches that human progress is possible only because the benevolent instincts of the heart are permanent, while the reasonings of the head are shifting. ”

“ Amid the scores of instances which must crowd into every mind, let us select five men, of especial historic significance, and who are commonly imaged to our minds with heads silvered over with age,—let us take Goethe in poetry, Newton in science, Bacon in philosophy, Columbus in discovery, Watt in mechanics. Now, how stand the facts? The greatest works of Goethe were conceived and partly executed when he was a young man; and if age found him more widely and worldly wise, it found him weak in creative passion, and, as a poet, living on the interest of his youthful conceptions. ”

“ Atticus retreated to her warm bed, he might look round on the weighty volumes, and their wealth of lore, and think how he trod the path they pointed out in solitary silence; and then, as he passed up stairs, a great, coarse rasp might make his fine-strung nerves quiver, and he might look at the candle he carried and it would suggest to him the old Gallic saw which had just given him the spasm. So you see that the curtains and peepholes had never discovered the price-current of the Atticus brand of candles.
Nobody knows where some folks buy or burn their candles. ”

“ Now it is the reaction from such a style of life on the truthful Anglo-Saxon nature that leads to an undervaluing of courtesy, as if it were of necessity opposed to sincerity. But it does not follow, because all is not gold that glitters, that nothing that glitters is gold, and because courtesy and delicacy of personal intercourse are often perverted to deceit, that they are not valuable allies of truth. No woman would prefer a slippery, plausible rascal to a rough, unceremonious honest man; but of two men equally truthful and affectionate, every woman would prefer the courteous one. ”

“ If we turn from intellectual powers to sentiments, which are the soul of powers, we shall find renewed proofs that the spirit which animates the kingdoms of mind is the youthful spirit of health and hope and energy and cheer. In the regretful tenderness with which all great thinkers have looked back upon their youth do not we detect the source of their most kindling inspirations? Time may have impaired their energies, clipped their aspirations, deadened their faith ”

“ The Column of Alexander, the bronze statue of Peter, with his horse poised in air on the edge of the rock, and the trees on the long esplanade in front of the Admiralty, were all similarly coated, every twig rising as rigid as iron in the dark air. Only the huge golden hemisphere of the Cathedral dome, and the tall, pointed golden spire of the Admiralty, rose above the gloom, and half shone with a muffled, sullen glare. A few people, swaddled from head to foot, passed rapidly to and fro, or a droschky, drawn by a frosted horse, sped away to the entrance of the Nevskoi Prospekt. ”

“ Youth we commonly represent under the image of morn,—clear, fresh, cheerful, radiant, the green sward trembling and gleaming with ecstasy as the rising sun transfigures its dew-drops into diamonds; but then morn is sometimes black with clouds, and foul with vapors, and terrible with tempests. In treating, therefore, of the position and influence of young men in history, let us begin with those in whom the energies of youth were early perverted from their appropriate objects, and fell under the dominion of sensual appetites or malignant passions. ”

“ When Pinxit looks around on the accumulating canvases gathering dust in his unfrequented studio, and thinks of the dreams which gave fairy tints to his palette, that none else could perceive,—when he feels that his genius is unacknowledged, and his toil in vain,—when he sees Dorb's crudities in every window, and Dorb's praises in the "Art-Journals," while Pinxit is starving unknown,—doesn't he take down the old saw from his easel, and try its edge over his proud, swelling heart? ”

“ But the question arises, Cannot this youth be preserved, or, at least, perpetually renewed? We have seen, in this rapid glance at history, that it is preserved as long as the mind retains its hold on the life of things; and we have seen, both in men of action and in men of meditation, this hold weakened by age. But would it be weakened, if the loftiest meditation issued in deeds instead of thoughts? Would youth depart, if the will acted on the same high level that the mind conceived? ”

“ Captain Saul is fast at his helm, while the big boom creaks and crashes from side to side as he beats up the narrowing channel, rounding Throg's Point, where the light-house and old whitewashed fort stand shining in the sun,—skirting low rocky islands, doubling other points, dashing at half-tide through the roar and whirl of Hell Gate,—Reuben glowing with excitement, and mindful of Kidd and of his buried treasure along these shores. ”

“ Towering a full head above the throng, a figure of superb strength and perfect symmetry, we give him that hearty admiration which is due to a man who illustrates and embellishes manhood. In this case we can give it freely: for that finely balanced head holds a clear, vigorous brain,—those large blue eyes look from the depths of a frank, noble nature,—and in that broad breast beats a heart warm with love for his country, and good-will for his fellow-men, whether high or low. ”

“ If home is merely the place where one may feel at liberty to be tired or dull or disagreeable, without losing one's character, I think the women have far more right to avail themselves of the liberty than the men; for all the lonesome, dull, disagreeable part of home-life comes into their department. It is they who must keep awake with the baby, if it frets; and if they do not feel spirits to make an attractive toilette in the morning, or have not the airy, graceful fancies that they had when they were girls, it is not so very much against them. ”

“ But still the tortured soul toiled sturdily on through the anguish of its self-created hells, the mind crazed and shattered, the heart hungry for peace, the will resolute that it should have no peace until it found peace in truth. Yet, our of this prodigious mental and moral anarchy, with its devil's dance of dogmas and delusions, the young Luther organized, before he was thirty, the broadest, raciest, and strongest character that ever put on the armor and hurled the bolts of the Church Militant. ”

“ The world it so sagaciously aims to inaugurate, what is it but a stationary and decrepit world,—a world which would soon decay, and drop into the abyss of nothingness, were it not for the rejuvenating vitality poured into it by the youth it cynically despises? True wisdom, indeed, springs from the wide brain which is fed from the deep heart ”