Various

“ One day there comes a singular piping sound,—it is the cry of the royal babe,—the hive is filled with rejoicing,—there is no longer any interregnum of the purple,—the queen is born! Perhaps the queen-makers have been too much in earnest, and at nearly the same moment the inmates of two royal cells issue together. Then is the time to try one's mettle,—no shrinking, no bias, nothing but pure patriotism. Let a ring be formed, and she who proves herself victor is worthy of homage. ”

“ Truth, courage, deference, good-nature, cheerfulness, sympathy, courtesy, tact, charity,—these are ingredients of the best conversation, which it would seem that no one need despair of attaining, and without which, in large measure, the most brilliant wit, the liveliest imagination, must soon repel rather than attract. And observe also, in connection with this, that it is not so much the words a man utters as the tones of his voice which express these moral and social qualities. Harsh, rude, blunt, severe tones will spoil the greatest flow of ideas or the utmost elegance of language. ”

“ This insect interests me, she is so beautiful. The other likewise interests me, she is so industrious. But here she comes back through the air: one would think her a warrior covered with chased armor and a golden cuirass; she buzzes as she comes along. The Chrysis has heard the buzzing, which is for her the terrible sound of a war-trumpet. She wishes to fly; she comes out; but the other, justly irritated, pounces upon the daring intruder, beating it with her head. She bruises and tears the brilliant gauze of her wings, and beats her down to the dust, where she falls stupefied and inanimate. ”

“ Was it the fault of poor Barbara Dinwiddie, that, when Sumter fell, and the gallant Anderson saw with anguish the old flag pulled down, she was the most desperate little Rebel in all Dixie? By no means! At school, at home, at church, she had been taught that Slavery was the divinest of all divine institutions; that all those outside barbarians, known as Yankees, who questioned its justice, its policy, its eternal fitness, were worse than infidels; that those favored individuals whose felicity it had been to be born and bred under the patriarchal benignity were the master race of this continent ”

“ We noticed a great stir on all sides of us, converging streams of stragglers, wounded men, and prisoners, as we made our way, scattering grasshoppers, over the fields, and soon mingled with the throng of troops on the open road to Winchester. It was about three miles from this town that our capture had taken place; and from the immense wagon-trains rumbling along with us, and the excited manner of their officers, I augured not as well for the Rebel cause. Perhaps Fortune had altered her humor, and the white eagles of victory had settled with the opposite side. ”

“ There, too, is the rattel, a little beast that at sunset shelters its eyes with a paw, for clearer view, spots a bee, and follows it: often these two make fellowship together, the one for the honey, the bird for the brood. But these are not the terrors of a temperate clime; the hives can despatch a field-mouse unassisted; the master who cannot rid them of the wax-moth they will desert without regrets; sounding the slogan for aid, no two bees will hesitate to grapple with the bold butchering wasp that invades them ”

“ Huish, to be sure, leaning upon Buffon, laughs at it, believes it on a par with Jack's Beanstalk, and is grimly satisfied that no bees ever erected fortifications of any kind other than as against the effluvium of murdered mouse or snail when they wall up its source in a tomb of wax; but it is impossible to look at the benevolent, bland face in any picture of Huber, with its sweetness of expression, and its innocent, wide, wandering eyes, and not wish to believe every word he says. ”

“ One producer erects hot-houses, into which he crowds the plants that otherwise would be hybernating, and, creating an artificial summer, stimulates the strawberry into bloom, then into fruit, even in the depth of winter the ripened berries are seen at some of the most celebrated fruit-stores. They command fabulous prices,—a spoonful of them readily bringing a dollar, without the demand being supplied. The rich always have money to spend; and though the world is never without its poor, yet it seems also to be never without an abundance of those who have more than they can wisely dispose of. ”

“ Oh, man or woman, if you have pity to spare, spend it not on Lee or Davis,—spend it on their victims, on the thousands of living hearts which these men of sin have doomed to an anguish that will end only with life!
Blessed are the mothers whose sons passed in battle,—a quick, a painless, a glorious death! Blessed in comparison,—yet we weep for them. We rise up and give place at sight of their mourning-garments. We reverence the sanctity of their sorrow. But before this other sorrow we are dumb in awful silence. ”

“ Oh, go to your tobacco-casks, your coupons, and your cotton, you soulless, huckstering old man! You can look on and see Abolitionism getting rampant in this once proud city, and not lift a voice or a finger to save us from ruin! You can see Maryland drifting into the horrible abyss of Yankeeism and Anti-slavery, and keep on doing business and minding the paltry affairs of your counting-room, as if all that gives grace and dignity to this wretched State were not on the verge of destruction! ”

“ The timid seal whom we have disturbed creeps back to her cell, the wild-fowl returns to its nest, the sea-swell rolls in and out in waves unbroken by our keel, and the warm sun holds all in his soft embrace. The winter winds will roar through the cavern erelong, the ocean lash pillar and ceiling with its foam, tempests will beat and rage against its giant columns, the stormy petrel will flap its wings in the archway, and the piercing cry of the sea-gull keep time to the diapason of the deep ”

“ That the young queen should lead the departing swarm seems the natural occurrence, being desirous of fulfilling her own destiny and of hastening from a hive hostile to all but one mistress whom they already know and love. Huber, however, will have it that it is the old queen, who, outraged and indignant at her treatment when a rival is allowed to live, sounds the alarm and sallies forth with her adherents. ”

“ We think, then, it may be taken for granted, that, while ignorant, the freedmen will vote right by the force of their instincts, and that the education they require will be the result of their possessing the political power to demand it. Free schools are not the creations of private benevolence, but of public taxation; it is useless to expect a system of universal education in a community which does not rest on universal suffrage; and the children of the poor freeman are educated at the public expense, not so much by the pleading of the children's needs as by the power of the father's ballot. ”

“ He tells us that General Blücher "had his disappointments, no doubt, but turned them, like the oyster does the speck of sand which annoys it, to a pearl,"—that in every state people may be cheerful; "the lambs skip, birds sing and fly joyously, puppies play, kittens are full of joyance, the whole air full of careering and rejoicing insects, that everywhere the good outbalances the bad, and that every evil that there is has its compensating balm." ”

“ But when we are listening to the low, sweet music in which a genial and joyous and tender soul will utter itself, what care we for the wit or genius which are so much envied elsewhere? We did not miss it here. We may have brought away with us from such company no great fund of new ideas, but you may be sure something deeper than thought has been awakened,—the well-spring of purest and tenderest sensibilities has been made to overflow, and our life will be the greener for it hereafter. ”

“ Is it the weariness of body entailed on us by our pilgrimages among the wonders of Staffa and the ruins of Iona,—is it the mind overtasked by the effort to grasp and comprehend so much of interest and novelty,—or is it the soul tuned to deeper thoughts and holier sympathies than are wont to engage it, which steeps us for the remainder of our voyage in the luxury of repose? ”

“ Somehow I had felt no compunction, no pride, at bearing through the streets, even at noonday, the symbol of my calling as a sewing-girl, in the shape of an unsightly bundle; but here, notwithstanding long reflection had familiarized me with what my new duties would necessarily be, yet when I came to the performance of them I felt no ambition to be publicly recognized as a strawberry-girl. ”

“ Remember what I have already said about our "common humanity." Do not be so absorbed in your favorite study that you shall not also have an eye and a heart for matters pertaining to the general welfare. Then there will be no company in which you need be wholly silent, though there will always be preference for a company which sympathizes with your more decided tastes and pursuits. I cannot, indeed, understand how one should ever arrive at that state in which he has no preference for any particular class or society. ”

“ There has been something even unearthly about his extreme unselfishness, his utter want of personal ambition, personal self-valuation, personal feeling.
The most unsparing criticism, denunciation, and ridicule never moved him to a single bitter expression, never seemed to awaken in him a single bitter thought. The most exultant hour of party victory brought no exultation to him; he accepted power not as an honor, but as a responsibility; and when, after a severe struggle, that power came a second time into his hands, there was something preternatural in the calmness of his acceptance of it. ”

“ It is the office of boatmen from the neighboring island of Ulva, hardy and skilful men, accustomed to these boisterous seas, to row passengers ashore, and in case of calm weather, such as we are blest with, to conduct their boats within the noble archway and up the grand broad aisle of Fingal's Cave: for the floor of this glorious cathedral is the rolling sea, whose green waves surge with a grand swell and fall to the very extremity of the cave, echoing through its vaults with a resonance which gave it its early Gaëlic name of Uaimh Bhinn, the Musical Cave. ”

“ There are many singular incidents related by Huber, which, if they are not true, one may exclaim, "The more's the pity." When he notes, that, in a time of disorder in the hive, he beheld the queen ascend a royal cell and seat herself upon it as if it were a throne, and, having sympathized for a season, suddenly assume the awful attitude and strike her disloyal people motionless, it interests us like some recital of the haps and heroics of Boadicea and her Britons. ”

“ We are still skirting the bold, precipitous shores of Mull, the central loadstone which has kept us all day to our course, and now and then our attention is especially engrossed by the view of her rugged cliffs, terrible in winter's storms, and her natural arches of basalt, through which the sea washes at high-water, and which betray in every feature a family likeness to great Staffa. ”

“ Here was I—a sewing-girl—breaking through the ordinary routine of female occupations, and standing on the threshold of an enterprise considered by the world unsuited to my sex, unfeminine because uniformly undertaken by men, hazardous because untried by women, but practically within the power of all having taste and courage to venture upon it,—here was I about to realize the dream of a whole year, the reward of untold anxieties, the solution of the great problem whether the garden were better than the needle. ”

“ The rough common sense of our humblest citizen disperses the philosopher's subtilties of logic with some such decisive sentence as that with which Dr. Johnson cut the meshes of the Fate-argument, or President Lincoln carried the pious defences of man-stealing. "We know we're free, and there's an end on 't." "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." If the state has no right to educate, it has no right to protect itself from the assaults of ignorance, and consequently no right to exist at all. ”

“ The poet who declared that many a flower was born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air, must have believed that the winged denizens of the air had no inheritance in them,—that their sweets were wasted because no human eye was present to admire them. I cannot agree with him; for here, when our garden was a solitude, with no human eye to admire its wealth of blossoms, they were thick with bees, and surely upon them their sweets were far from being wasted. The flowers must have been created as much for the enjoyment of nameless insects as for the gratification of man. ”

“ If General Lee had been determined not to have prisoners starved or abused, does any one doubt that he could have prevented these things? Nobody doubts it. His raiment is red with the blood of his helpless captives. Does any one doubt that Jefferson Davis, living in ease and luxury in Richmond, knew that men were dying by inches in filth and squalor and privation in the Libby Prison, within bowshot of his own door? Nobody doubts it. It was his will, his deliberate policy, thus to destroy those who fell into his hands. ”

“ It would seem, that, if conversation is an art, like other arts, there must be rules and methods to attain to it. This is true; but I must first remind you that mere facility, propriety, or elegance of speech is but a small part of the discipline required to make an agreeable and profitable talker. You must have something to express, something that you long to utter, something that you feel it would be for the advantage of others to hear. For the furnishing of mind and heart comes before any special power to bring out of one's treasury things new or old. ”

“ Can a gentleman be a gentleman when logic requires the truth? Will dry dissertation fill up the place of compliment and flowery talk? Will agricultural measures,—Mill on Liberty,—Buckle on Civilization,—High, Low, or Middle Church,—Pleiocene periods,—Hind's new comet, and the division of labor, suffer us to enjoy life as we used, and to amuse ourselves with the innocent prattle of ladies' tongues?" Rosy, posy, pinky, honey, peppermint, and sugar-plummy! "One part of management in husbands lies in a judicious mixture of good-humor, attention, flattery, and compliments." ”

“ An enlightened conscience would make many persons better talkers than they are now, for it would present the matter in the light of a duty. A consciousness of intellectual power or of ample learning makes one more ready to open his mouth before intelligent men; for, whether rightly or not, one does not like to talk before others of subjects on which he knows that they are better informed than he. And yet it is no good reason for maintaining silence in the company of some eminent scholar, that he knows so much more than you. ”