Various

“ They entered the little parlor at the Parsonage looking so beaming, that Olive and Bathsheba exchanged glances which implied so much that it would take a full page to tell it with all the potentialities involved.
"How magnificent Myrtle is this evening, Bathsheba!" said Cyprian Eveleth, pensively.
"What a handsome pair they are, Cyprian!" said Bathsheba cheerfully.
Cyprian sighed. "She always fascinates me whenever I look upon her. Isn't she the very picture of what a poet's love should be,—a poem herself,—a glorious lyric,—all light and music! See what a smile the creature has! And her voice! ”

“ She had got back her health, bringing with it a riper wealth of womanhood. She had found her destiny in the consciousness that she inherited the beauty belonging to her blood, and which, after sleeping for a generation or two as if to rest from the glare of the pageant that follows beauty through its long career of triumph, had come to the light again in her life, and was to repeat the legends of the olden time in her own history.
Myrtle's wardrobe had very little of ornament, such as the modistes of the town would have thought essential to render a young girl like her presentable. ”

“ They who earnestly believe in the supremacy of the moral law as the sole legitimate source of all authority—in a religion of duty, of which politics should be the application—cannot, through any amount of personal abnegation, act in concert with a government based upon the worship of temporary and material interest.
Our rulers have no great ruling conception,—no belief in the supremacy of the moral law,—no just notion of life, nor of the human unity,—no belief in a divinely appointed goal which it is the duty of mankind to reach through labor and sacrifice. ”

“ Once useful and holy, I say, because, had it not been for the unity of moral life in which we were held for more than eight centuries by the Papacy, we should not now have been prepared to realize the new unity to come; had it not been for the dogma of human equality in heaven, we should not now have been prepared to proclaim the dogma of human equality on earth. And, I declare it a lie and a source of immorality at the present day, because every great institution becomes such if it seeks to perpetuate its authority after its mission is fulfilled. ”

“ How often, when we have been listening to the swelling music of the cabinet organs at the ware-rooms of Messrs. Mason and Hamlin in Broadway, have we desired to put one of those instruments in every clerk's boarding-house room, and tell him to take all the ennui, and half the peril, out of his life by learning to play upon it! No business man who works as intensely as we do can keep alive the celestial harmonies within him,—no, nor the early wrinkles from his face,—without some such pleasant mingling of bodily rest and mental exercise as playing upon an instrument. ”

“ The work of the heroes is play to us; the pang of the martyr is a thrill of rapture; the exile's longing is a strain of plaintive music touching and delighting us. We are not only young again, we are immortal. It is this divine sense of superiority to fate which is the supreme good won from travel in historic lands, and from the presence of memorable things, and which no sublimity of natural aspects can bestow. It is this which forms the wide difference between Europe and America,—a gulf that it will take a thousand years to bridge. ”

“ From that time forward it has unceasingly declined, until it has sunk to the thing we now behold it;—disinherited of all power of inspiration over civilization; the impotent negation of all movement, of all liberty, of all development of science or life; destitute of all sense of duty, power of sacrifice, or faith in its own destiny; held up by foreign bayonets; trembling before the face of the peoples, and forsaken by humanity, which is seeking the path of progress elsewhere.
The Papacy has lost all moral basis, aim, sanction, and source of action at the present day. ”

“ Italy is a religion. And when, in my earliest years, I believed that the initiative of the third life of Europe would spring from the heart, the action, the enthusiasm and sacrifice of our people, I heard within me the grand voice of Rome sounding once again, hailed and accepted with loving reverence by the peoples, and telling of moral unity and fraternity in a faith common to all humanity. ”

“ Art, society, religion,—all these are faculties inseparable from human life itself, progressive as life itself, and eternal as life itself. Every epoch of humanity has had and will have its own social, artistic, and religious expression. In every epoch man will ask of tradition and of conscience whence he came, and to what goal he is bound; he will ask through what paths that goal is to be reached, and seek to solve the problem suggested by the existence within him of a conception of the Infinite, and of an ideal impossible of realization in the finite conditions of his earthly existence. ”

“ It is therefore the duty of all those amongst us who have it at heart to win the city of the future and the triumph of truth, to make war, not only upon the temporal power,—who should dare deny that to the admitted representative of God on earth?—but upon the Papacy itself. It is therefore our duty to go back to the dogma upon which the institution is founded, and to show that that dogma has become insufficient and unequal to the moral wants, aspirations, and dawning faith of humanity. ”

“ May the young, as yet uncorrupted by scepticism, prepare the way for its realization; and may they, in the name of our national tradition and the future, unceasingly protest against all who seek to immobilize human life in the name of a dogma extinct, or to degrade it by diverting it from the eternal worship of the Ideal.
The religious question is pre-eminent over every other at the present day, and the moral question is indissolubly linked with it. We are bound either to solve these, or renounce all idea of an Italian mission in the world. ”

“ It is in such parlors that the instrument best answers the end of its creation. There is many a piano in the back room of a little store, or in the uncarpeted sitting-room of a farm-house, that yields a larger revenue of delight than the splendid grand of a splendid drawing-room. In these humble abodes of refined intelligence, the piano is a dear and honored member of the family. ”

“ Whatever there might be of poverty in the condition of the few dozens of human beings who there forced a scanty subsistence from the sea, I was to discover one person in the place who did in no way share it,—who, born as it might seem to different destinies, yet, voluntarily choosing wild Nature for companionship, and rising superior to the forbidding climate and the general desolation, rejoiced here in his own strong manhood, and lived seemingly contented as well with himself as with the great world of which he heard from afar but the faint murmurs. ”

“ Tradition has marked out and defined the characteristics of a high mission more distinctly in Italy than elsewhere. We alone, among the nations that have expired in the past, have twice arisen in resurrection and given new life to Europe. The innate tendency of the Italian mind always to harmonize thought and action confirms the prophecy of history, and points out the rôle of Italy in the world to be a work of moral unification,—the utterance of the synthetic word of civilization. ”

“ Awkward pauses will occur in all but the best-regulated parties, and people will get together, in the best houses, who quench and neutralize one another. It is the piano that fills those pauses, and gives a welcome respite to the toil of forcing conversation. How could "society" go on without the occasional interposition of the piano? One hundred and sixty years ago, in those days beloved and vaunted by Thackeray, when Louis XIV. was king of France, and Anne queen of England, society danced, tattled, and gambled. Cards have receded as the piano has advanced in importance. ”

“ Men whose aim it is to combat the practice of egotism instilled into the Italian people by tyranny, to inspire them with a sacred devotion to the fatherland, and make of them a great nation, the artificer of the progress of humanity, present as the first intellectual food of this people now awakening to new life, whose whole strength lies in their good instincts and virginity of intellect, a theory the ultimate consequences of which are to establish egotism upon a basis of right! ”

“ If I am here hemmed in by barren hills, and live in a desert waste, yet, as one of your sweetest poets has put it, my
'Fancy, like the finger of a clock,
Runs the great circuit and is still at home';
and truly, I believe that I have in this retreat about as much enjoyment of life as they who taste of it more freely; for while I can here feel all the world's warm pulsations, I am freed from its annoyances: if the sweet is less sweet, the bitter is less bitter. But—Well, let's have the billiards. ”

“ But the mission of Italy in the world was at all times religious, and the essential character of Italian genius was at all times religious.
The essence of every religion lies in a power, unknown to mere science, of compelling man to reduce thought to action, and harmonize his practical life with his moral conception. The genius of our nation, whenever it has been spontaneously revealed, and exercised independently of all foreign inspiration, has always evinced the religious character, the unifying power to which I allude. ”

“ But what then becomes of the idea of progress?—what of the conception we have lately gained from historic science of the gradual but infallible education of humanity,—of the link of solidary ascending life which unites succeeding generations,—of the duty of sacrificing, if need be, the present generation to the elevation and morality of the generations of the future,—of the pre-eminence of the fatherland over individuals, and the certainty that their devotion and martyrdom will, in the fulness of time, advance the honor, greatness, or virtue of their nation? ”

“ Marian had drifted away upon a vaster ocean than that whose music lulled her from without,—upon that sea whose waves are dreams. The night was wearing on, the lights gleamed from the anchored vessels, the bay rippled serenely against the low sea-wall, the breeze blew gently in. Marian's baby breathing grew deeper and more tranquil; and as all the sorrows of the weary earth might be imagined to exhale themselves in spring through the breath of violets, so it seemed as if it might be with Kenmure's burdened heart. ”

“ Is not Wall Street at this hour a street of bankers? Is not the Boston Pearl Street a street of leather men? Is not the bridge at Florence given over to jewellers? Was not my valise, there, bought in Rome at the street of trunk-makers? Do not all booksellers like to huddle together as long as they can? And when Ticknor and Fields move a few inches from Washington Street to Tremont Street, do not Russell and Bates, and Childs and Jenks, and De Vries and Ibarra, follow them as soon as the shops can be got ready? ”

“ Nor should I, had Italy been a nation for half a century, have regarded their doctrines as fraught with any real danger. Humanity will not abandon its appointed path for them; and to hear them—in an age in which the discoveries of all great thinkers combine to demonstrate the existence of an intelligent preordained law of unity and progress—spouting materialism in the name of science, because they have skimmed a volume of Vogt, or attended a lecture by Moleschott, might rather move one to amusement than anger. ”

“ If you reject all Supreme law, all Providential guidance, all aim, all obligation imposed by the belief in a mission towards humanity, you have no right to prescribe your conception of well-being to others, as worthier or better. You have no certain basis, no principle upon which to found a system of education; you have nothing left but force, if you are strong enough to impose it. ”

“ The sounding-board—a thin, clear sheet of spruce under the strings—is the piano's soul, wanting which, it were a dead thing. Almost every resonant substance in nature has been tried for sounding-boards, but nothing has been found equal to spruce. Countless experiments have been made with a view to ascertain precisely the best way of shaping, arranging, and fixing the sounding-board, the best thickness, the best number and direction of the supporting ribs; and every great maker is happy in the conviction that he is a little better in sounding-boards than any of his rivals. ”

“ On the next morning Kenmure and Laura came back to us, and I walked down to receive them at the boat. I had forgotten how striking was their appearance, as they stood together. His broad, strong, Saxon look, his noble bearing and clear blue eyes, enhanced the fascination of her darker beauty.
America is full of the short-lived bloom and freshness of girlhood; but grace is a rarer gift, and indeed it is only a few times in life that one sees anywhere a beauty that really controls us with a permanent charm. ”

“ Pedrocchi's is the great caffè of Padua, a granite edifice of Egyptian architecture, which is the mausoleum of the proprietor's fortune. The pecuniary skeleton at the feast, however, does not much trouble the guests. They begin early in the evening to gather into the elegant saloons of the caffè,—somewhat too large for so small a city as Padua,—and they sit there late in the night over their cheerful cups and their ices with their newspaper and their talk. Not so many ladies are to be seen as at the caffè in Venice, for it is only in the greater cities that they go much to these public places. ”

“ Every error is a crime in those whose duty it is to watch over the cradle of a nation.
Either we must admit the idea of a God,—of the moral law, which is an emanation from him,—and the idea of human duty, freely accepted by mankind, as the practical consequence of that law,—or we must admit the idea of a ruling force of things, and its practical consequence, the worship of individual force or success, the omnipotence of fact. ”