Various

“ The low voice of her native land, that comes to her ear with a charming flow from the lips of her new teacher, never to speak of her doubts or questionings; the constrained love of the Doctor, her New Papa, framing itself, whenever it touches upon the deeper motives of her nature, in stark formulas of speech, that blind and confound her; the spinster sister talking kindly, but commending the tie of her hat-ribbons in the same tone with which she urges adherence to some cumbrous enunciation of doctrine. And Adèle cherishes her little friendships (most of all with Rose) ”

“ But between these two classes of natures lies another, to which has been given an equal share of ideality,—in which the conception and the desire of excellence are equally strong, but in which a discriminating common-sense acts like a balance-wheel in machinery. What is the reason that the most exacting idealists never make themselves unhappy about not being able to fly like a bird or swim like a fish? Because common-sense teaches them that these accomplishments are so utterly out of the question that they never arise to the mind as objects of desire. ”

“ Jane and Maria laugh at John for his partiality to the Daytons, and yet they themselves feel the same attraction. At the Daytons' they somehow find themselves heroines; their drawings are so admired, their singing is so charming to these uncultured ears, that they are often beguiled into giving pleasure with their own despised acquirements; and Jane, somehow, is very tolerant of the devoted attention of Will Dayton, a joyous, honest-hearted fellow, whom, in her heart of hearts, she likes none the worse for being unexacting and simple enough to think her a wonder of taste and accomplishments. ”

“ Ideality is the faculty by which we conceive of and long for perfection; and at a glance it will be seen, that, so far from being an evil ingredient of human nature, it is the one element of progress that distinguishes man's nature from that of the brute. While animals go on from generation to generation, learning nothing and forgetting nothing, practising their small circle of the arts of life no better and no worse from year to year, man is driven by ideality to constant invention and alteration, whence come arts, sciences, and the whole progress of society. ”

“ Happy is he, provided his poverty be not his exemption, who has never wrung his hands in utter despair of finding centrality, unity, at last,—a centre where the divine passion and afflatus of the heart are reconciled with the hard-eyed perceptions of common-sense.
But life is not a mere pendulum. Nature works to her ends. There is oscillation, but also growth. And so, though Wilhelm recurs to his illusions, and even embodies them by going upon the stage, the seeds of discriminating judgment are sown in his heart, and are already germinating. ”

“ First, and in the person of Jarno, enters the Critical Understanding. True as steel, cold and keen as steel also, antipathetic to all sentiment, clear and decisive partly by what he has and partly by what he has not, Jarno offers with unsparing rigor to shear away Wilhelm's illusions, not seeing that in these very illusions runs an artery rich in his reddest life-blood.
Critical understanding, the disenchanter,—light without heat or color,—begins at a certain period in nobly imagining and impassioned youth to break through the cloudy glories, and shame all with its cold glare. ”

“ Goethe, therefore, follows Nature in placing this next to imagination as a producer of growth,—next in Nature and in Goethe's pages, because its alliance with imagination is so immediate and intimate. He who does not idealize does not love.
But here also is peril. Love, while filling Wilhelm's being with those precious heats which are the blind substance of all chivalry and nobility, clothes the stage with the added enchantment of Mariana's presence, and so bewitches the poor youth with still more of that "false tendency" which is his proper Satan. ”

“ Every allusion to Slavery reminds our Commissioner of joys now departed. Every glimpse of a black man in the melancholy misery of freedom recalls to him those happy scientific reveries contributed to anthropological lore by Messrs. Nott and Gliddon. He admires each dusky figure in the direct ratio of its nudity, and every added rag of civilized clothing seems to him so much subtracted from the proprieties of life. Of course a colored soldier is the climax of aggravation to his grief; and it does not even relieve his feelings, if the uniform-coat has no buttons. ”

“ We have seen in our time a woman gifted with all those faculties which rejoice in the refinements of society, dispensing the elegant hospitalities of a bountiful home, joyful and giving joy. A sudden reverse has swept all this away, the wealth on which it was based has melted like a fog-bank in a warm morning, and we have seen her with her little family beginning life again in the log cabin of a Western settlement. ”

“ And though it winds sometimes through inaccessible places, and you tell its course only by its music, and not by its sparkle, and though it channels a path sometimes through murky valleys whose every vapor is laden with pestilence, yet you know that pure and purifying, singing through its leafy solitudes and shining heavenly clear in Tophet as in Tempe, the burden of its song is peace on earth, good-will to man, while it hastens on to mingle crystal stream with the waters of the river of life. ”

“ Great men are great tyrants. We escape the great man and the great writer in Hamerton. We have in him an instructor, not a dictator. John Ruskin came, and, like John the Baptist, cried, "Repent! repent!"—but Hamerton comes to us as the apostle of a doctrine that needs exposition more than enunciation, and he speaks the words of truth and soberness. Those who did not follow Ruskin laughed and railed at him, and literary executioners hastened to lay violent hands on him. Hamerton's public was prepared by a powerful forerunner, and he is therefore neither assailed nor neglected. ”

“ Yes, when he craves of Nature, not aggrandizement, but a duty,—when he entreats her commands to bestow of all that is deepest and dearest in his spirit on another, and yet to do it so in simple response to her behest that in all he shall give only what is due,—then he is free. No self-flattery here; no feeling that he is performing some wonderful piece of self-sacrifice, which puts the universe under obligations to him. He would give all, but give where he owes all, not only in obedience, but in meek thankfulness. ”

“ A mere life of the understanding is just one degree better than idiocy. Sweep out imagination, and all the angels go with it. To freeze the heated geysers of the soul? It were to freeze the core of the world. Better to be nobly moonstruck than turned into a pillar of salt, even were it Attic salt. Better to be Don Quixote than a very archangel Sancho. ”

“ There are those who stolidly measure a twelve-month always by its count, and age by such token as a gray head; but who has not had experience of months so piled with life that two or three or four of them count more upon the scale of mortality than a score of other and sunny ones? Who cannot reckon such? Who, looking back, cannot summon to his thought some passage of a week in which he seemed to stride toward the end with a crazy swiftness, and under which he felt that every outward indication of age was deepening its traces with a wondrous surety? ”

“ And now the boards feel thin under Wilhelm's feet. Enough of these. Enough of masquerading. Enough of make-belief heroics: belief, accepting limits and conditions, that on them and out of them it may build the spiritual architectures of life, is heroism. Enough of play-acting: work is the true play. Moral imagination has found its home and its freedom in the real; and therewith the first epoch of his life rounds into completion, passes over its virtue to another, and in his life there is an ending and a beginning. ”

“ Through the long toil out of chaos to orderly completion and green fertility, Nature bore in her heart one constant, inspiring hope,—at last to educate a man. To this end are all times and seasons; to this end are government, property, labor, rest, pain, and peace; the world of things and the world of events alike draw meekly near to the crescent soul, and tender to it their total result, saying,—"In thee, only in thee, do we come at length to use." ”

“ Kate Dayton has an uncultivated voice, which often falls from pitch; but she has a perfectly infectious gayety of good-nature, and when she is once at the piano, and all join in some merry troll, he begins to think that there may be something better even than good singing; and then they have dances and charades and games, all in such contented, jolly, impromptu ignorance of the unities of time, place, and circumstance, that he sometimes doubts, where ignorance is such bliss, whether it isn't in truth folly to be wise. ”

“ In Wilhelm it is sweetly qualified with love and imagination. It appears in luxuriant dreams of the poet's life,—of him who is not merely a pen-poet, but a living lyric, a poet in heart and soul. "And this life of true glory," cries the heart of Wilhelm, "may be mine, mine!" A gentle and magnanimous egoism, but still an egoism. But the due subjection of this self-feeling will come duly; in the qualifications that even now make it lovely the sure promise of that is contained.
Fourth in order appears a much prettier figure, namely, Philanthropy, the loving desire to serve man. ”

“ In another way, also, the war will prove a drawback upon forming an effective militia system. We shall have, for some years to come, no class disposed to take a very hearty part in it. For a returned soldier to find pleasure in drilling is as if a wood-sawyer, at the close of his week's work, should bring his tools into his sitting-room, and saw for fun. On the other hand, those who have not served in the army will feel some natural sensitiveness about playing soldier in presence of veterans, and being satirized, perhaps, as a mere home-guard. ”

“ Common-sense teaches that there is no one branch of human art or science in which perfection is not a point forever receding. A botanist gravely assures us, that to become perfect in the knowledge of one branch of sea-weeds would take all the time and strength of a man for a life-time. There is no limit to music, to the fine arts. There is never a time when the gardener can rest, saying that his garden is perfect. House-keeping, cooking, sewing, knitting, may all, for aught we know, be pushed on forever, without exhausting the capabilities for better doing. ”

“ Moneybags pooh-poohs; but Nature is too strong for them, and the children play on. It is significant. In truth, a child's faculty for play, that is, for imaginative engagement, is the prime measure of his capacity for growth. Follow his play, you who would know him,—follow it with studious, sympathetic eye; for in the range and depth of imaginative interest it displays you read the promise of his being. The child that is not fascinated by his fancies is of a meagre nature, and will come to nothing great.
Why is imagination so concerned in growth? ”

“ It would not be possible, within the limits of a book notice, to treat fitly all the questions which are raised by these highly suggestive essays. Dr. Hedge's clear and chiselled statements cut all the jesses of our thoughts, and they rise unhooded into his still air. Providence, Prayer, Free-Will, and Retribution, Evil, Immortality, and Faith,—such themes stock this volume, and they are all treated in a way to command the attention of the reader, to bid him ponder, to contribute glad assent, or to pay the equally flattering tribute of awakened criticism. ”

“ A prose picture: yet even here we read through all else to man, and through all else in man himself to the upbuilding of his spirit. As Goethe reads life, let us see if we can read his book.
We assume, then, his point of view. Growth,—our eyes are given us that we may see this as the end, all else as material and means. Prices and kingdoms may rise or fall; we are not indifferent; but the immortal architectures of man's spirit are priceless, and here the sceptres are indeed held by divine right. ”

“ Cold—cold prudence and choice—appears first in its embodiment, Jarno, who symbolizes its secret beginnings in Wilhelm. But then and there its beginnings are only symbolized. Soon, however, disappointment bitterer than death, with sickness, remorse, horror, enters and chills him to the core. Ah, and so these clouds of glory are only raw vapor and mist, after all! The rainy season has set in. "Let's into the house," says Prudence; "let's box ourselves up nicely, and get some comfort, since that is the whole of life." ”

“ Let him succeed in that, and the word of words for our century and for many centuries is spoken. "Positive philosophy," with complacent sciolism, may still coldly asseverate that the world is a dead congeries of "laws," into whose realm man is cast to take pot-luck in the universe; but we shall know better. The worldling may still find all good and all evil in the mere fortunes of man; we shall see beyond these. The fatalist may persist in regarding limits and conditions as the all in all of life; we shall see them as a foothold for growth. ”

“ He sees that he himself is limited, and that possibly the world might not fare so much better in his hands than in those of its Maker. It dawns upon him, that, on the whole, he is not here to make worlds, but to work in a limited sphere and for limited results. And yet his hopes and imaginations are not put to shame; for he feels, that, even amid these iron limits of labor and effect, a result of unlimited, absolute worth is also getting wrought. ”

“ But in a woman in feeble health, incumbered with a flock of restless little ones, and whose circumstances allow her to keep but one servant, it may be a piece of moral heroism to shut her eyes on many such things, while securing mere essentials to life and health. It may be a virtue in her not to push neatness to such lengths as to wear herself out, or to break down her only servant, and to be resigned to have her tastes and preferences for order, cleanliness, and beauty crossed, as she would resign herself to any other affliction. ”

“ Life seems to drive them along without giving them time for anything; everything is ragged, hasty performance, of which the mind most keenly sees and feels the raggedness and hastiness. Even one thing done as it really ought to be done would be a rest and refreshment to the soul; but nowhere, in any department of its undertakings, is there any such thing to be perceived.
But there are cases where a great deal of wear and tear can be saved to the nerves by a considerate making up of one's mind as to how much in certain circumstances had better be undertaken at all. ”