Various

“ All creatures recognize the day, and only one weeps to see the light.
Evadne knew that on yonder shore waited the dreaded messengers who would gather the homeless into the Christian fold. She stayed to utter one farewell to the cold, the cruel marble, with its unvaried smile.
"Be my god!" she cried, aloud. "In whatever strange land, to whatever unknown religion I may be led, the god of this forgotten temple shall have the worship of my heart!"
She crossed the marble pavement. She clasped with her white cold arms the knees of Apollo—Hold! the form totters!—it is too late!—it must fall! ”

“ The Ideal Tendency is simple love of life, felt first as desire and then as satisfaction. The men who represent it are not seekers, but finders, who go on to find more and more; for in the poet desire has fulfilled itself. Enjoyment makes the artist. He has gone on before us, reaching into the abyss of possibility; but he has reached more mightily. He begins to know what is promised in the universal attraction, in this eager turning of all faces toward our future. There is a centre from which no eye can be diverted, for it is the beam of sight. ”

“ He is not one of our familiar birds; and unless we live in close proximity to a wood that is haunted by a stream, we shall never hear his voice from our doors or windows. He sings neither in the orchard, nor the garden, nor in the suburbs of the city. He shuns the exhibitions of art, and reserves his wild notes for those who frequent the inner sanctuary of the groves. All who have once become familiar with his song await his arrival with impatience, and take note of his silence in midsummer with regret. ”

“ Humanity is our inheritance, but not historical humanity. Man seems to be broken and scattered all abroad. The great lives are only eminent examples of a single virtue, and by admiration of every hero we have been crippled on some one side. If he is free, he is also coarse; if delicate, he is overlaid by the gross world; saints are timid and feverish, afraid of being spattered in the first puddle; heroes are profane. We must melt up all the old metal to make a new man and carry forward the common consciousness. ”

“ The artist comes to bid us trust the Ideal Tendency, and not dishonor him who moves therein. He is no trifler, then, to be thrust aside by the doctors with their sciences, or the economists with production and use. He offers manhood to man and womanhood to woman.
We have named Ideality a love of life. Nay, what is it but life itself,—and that loving but true living? What word can have any value for us, unless it is a record of inevitable expansions in character. The universe is pledged to every heart, and the artist represents its promise. ”

“ While listening to the notes of the Wood-Sparrow, we are continually saluted by the agreeable, though less musical song of the Chewink, or Ground-Robin,—a bird that frequents similar places. This is a very beautiful bird, elegantly spotted with white, red, and black,—the female being of a bright bay color where the male is red. Every rambler knows him, not only by his plumage and his peculiar note, but also by his singular habit of lurking about among the bushes, appearing and disappearing like a squirrel, and watching all our movements. ”

“ They believe that the gods have rendered it invisible except at the rising day; but, in truth, the oaks, the laurels, and the unpruned ivy conceal it from view, at all times, except when the rays from the east strike upward. I have delighted to teach the people fables concerning this island and the lost temple; for as long as they fear to tread upon this spot, I have a retreat for myself, where I range unmolested.
"See yonder, so white among the dark cypress-trees, my father's villa! It has gardens and shady groves, but I love best the wild branching oaks which give their shade to Evadne! ”

“ Evadne broke a way over fallen trees and stepping-stones imbedded in sea-sand, and gained the opposite bank. The solitude in which she found herself appeared deeper, more awful, than before the chasm lay between the greater island and the less. She listened motionless to the soft, but continual murmur of the wood, the music of leaves and waves and unseen wings, by which all seeming silence of Nature is made as rich to the ear as her fabrics to the eye, so that, in comparison, the garments of a king are mean, though richly dyed, embroidered on every border, and hung with jewels. ”

“ One singularly-shaped summit, far to the south, attracted my attention, and I was about to ask its name, when Steve called out, with the air of one who communicates something of more than ordinary significance,—"Blue Mountain!" The name, Steve's manner, and I know not what of mysterious cause, gave to the place a strange importance. I felt a new and unaccountable attraction to the mountain. Some enchantment seemed to be casting its glamour over me from that distance even. There was thenceforward no goal for my wanderings but the Blue Mountain. ”

“ When her mother questioned him, anxiously, of her daughter's spiritual estate, he answered, that she was a child of a strange graciousness of nature, and of a singular genius; to which Katy responded, with a woman's pride, that she was all her father over again. It is only now and then that a matter-of-fact woman is sublimated by a real love; but if she is, it is affecting to see how impossible it is for death to quench it; for in the child the mother feels that she has a mysterious and undying repossession of the father. ”

“ See how the people of this village of Athos flock together! Some festival occupies them. I see them going forth from the gates in hurrying crowds; and now a band of men approaches. Some one is about to enter their town, to whom they wish to do honor, and doubtless they bear green branches to strew in the way. I know not what festival they celebrate, for the altars are all deserted."
"I see a boat put off from the shore," said Evadne, "and it seems to turn its prow hitherward." ”

“ Every principle of science, every deduction of philosophy, is a tool. Our very religion, as we dare to name it, is a key which opens the heavens to admit myself and family. Art offers only life; but perhaps that will appear worth taking without looking beyond. Can we look beyond? Life is an end in itself, and so better than any tool.
What is that which underlies all arts as their essence, the thing to be expressed and celebrated? What is poetry, the creation from which the artist is named? ”

“ We cannot think without exploration of the divine order and recognition of its divinity, without finding ourselves carried away by it to service and adoration. All good is assured to us in Truth, and Truth follows us hard, drives us into many a corner, and will have us at last. So Love surprises all, and every virtue has a pass-key to every heart. Out of conflicting experience, amid barbarism and dogmatism, from feathers that float and stones that fall, we deduce the great law of moral gravitation, which binds spirit to spirit, and all souls to the best. Recognition of that law is worship. ”

“ The peculiar spirit of her genius is not more distinctly to be seen in the verse of Boileau than in that of Pope,—in the sounding periods of Bossuet than in Addison's easy phrase. The spectacle of a nation so distinguished, which had carried tyranny to a perfection and invested it with a splendor never before seen, becoming the coryphæus of freedom, might easily have fascinated a mind less impressible by nature, and less disposed by education for favorable impressions, than that of Jefferson. ”

“ Both parties have gained from their intercourse a certainty of power and promise of greater power. Silly people fill the world with lamentation over human inconstancy; but if we follow love, we cannot cling to the beloved. We must love onward, and only when our friends go before us can we be true both to friendship and to them.
How eager and tremulous his excitement when at last the youth encounters all beauty in a maiden! Now he is on his trial. Can he move her? for he must be to her nothing or all. How stately and far-removed she seems in her crystal sphere! ”

“ Apollo himself should not have forbidden me to gather the wild grapes of this island, since I and this child and Eleusa, my wife, have not during many days found other food."
"It is indeed true," exclaimed the boatman, "that madness presently falls upon those who eat of these grapes, since you speak impious words against the god. Behold, yonder is woody Tenedos, where his altar stands; it is now many years, since, filled with wrath against the dwellers here, he seized this rock, and hurled it into the sea; the very hills melted in the waves. ”

“ He was not content that his country should be rich and powerful; his ardent patriotism carried him forward to a time when the great Republic should give law to the world for every department of thought and action.
But this sympathetic spirit is most clearly to be seen in that broad humanity which was the source of his philosophy. He sympathized with man,—his sufferings, joys, fears, hopes, and aspirations. The law of his nature made him a democrat. Men of his own rank, when introduced to him, found his manner cold and reserved; but the young and the ignorant were attracted from the first. ”

“ This fisherman seemed like one of those that plied their trade, and were the Lord's disciples, at the Sea of Galilee, eighteen hundred years ago. The very flesh and blood inclosing such a nature keep a long youth through life. Witness the genius, (who is only the more thorough man,) poet, painter, sculptor, finder-out, or whatever; how fresh and fair such an one looks out from under his old age! Let him be Christian, too, and he shall look as if—shedding this outward—the inward being would walk forth a glorified one. ”

“ In his productions you often meet golden sentences of soberest counsel, beautiful tributes to real worth, stirring appeals for the oppressed, and touching eulogies of the loved and lost.
Thus much of the history and machinery of Punch. His salutary influence is to be spoken of next. But before venturing upon what may seem indiscriminate praise, let it be confessed that our hero is not without his weaknesses. Nothing human is perfect, and Punch is very human. The good Homer sometimes nods; so doth the good Punch. He does not always perform equally well,—keep up to his highest level. ”

“ Yet it is, for all that, something which haunts the memory long,—which comes back years after in inland vales and quiet farm-houses like brown-moss agates set in emerald meadows, in book-lined studios, and in close city streets. For it is part of the might and mystery of the sea, the secret influence that sets the blood on fire and the heart throbbing,—of any in whose veins runs some of the true salt-water sympathy. Men are born landsmen, and are born on land, but belong to the Ocean's family. ”

“ The way of the world will not suit a valiant boy. To make elbow-room and get breathing-space, he becomes a reformer; and when now he can find no new worlds to conquer, he will make a world, laying in truth and justice every stone. The same seeker, who was so fired by the sight of his eyes, looking out from a mill-yard or a shoe-shop on the many-colored activity of his kind, who ran such a round of arts and sciences, pursuing the very secret of his being in each new enterprise, is now discontented with all that has been done. ”

“ Punch is independent and original in this respect. His strange creed seems to be, that human nature is human nature,—whether, in its feminine department, you robe it in silk or calico, and, in its male department, button a red coat over the breast of an officer of the Guards, or put the coarse jerkin on the broad back of the industrious toilsman. And according to this whimsical belief, he writes and talks jocosely, but with covert common sense. His warm and catholic humanity runs up and down the whole social scale with a clear-sighted equity. ”

“ No one will deny the sincerity, earnestness, devotedness, sublime consecration to duty, of the heroine of the hospitals of Scutari. No one will dispute the practical piety of the gentle, but fearless, the tenderhearted, but truly strong-minded woman, who made the lazar-house her home for months together,—ministered to its sick, miserable, and ignorant inmates,—put, by the unostentatious exercise of indomitable faith and unswerving self-sacrifice, the love and humanity of the Gospel in direct and strongest contrast with the barbarisms of war. ”

“ Soon they will be old friends, prattling to gray hairs of the brown locks and bounding breath of youth.
The pioneer of our growth is Imagination. Desire and Hope go on before into the wilderness of the unknown; they open paths; they make a clearing; they build and settle firmly before we ourselves in will and power arrive at this opening, but they never await our coming. ”

“ If a man is thoroughly mean by nature, let him give full swing to his meanness. Such a fellow brings discredit upon generosity by putting on its semblance. If he attempts to disguise the smallness of his soul, he only adds to his contemptible trait of meanness the still more despicable vice of hypocrisy. Mean by the sacred institution of Nature, and without a generous trait to mar the excellence of his native meanness, so long as he continues unqualifiedly mean, he exists a perfect type of a particular character, and presents to us a fine illustration of the vast capabilities of Nature. ”