Various

“ You don't know what it is to be cold, you don't, Johnny, in the warm gentleman's life you've lived. I was used to Maine forests, and I was used to January, but that was what I call cold.
The wind blew from the ocean, straight as an arrow. The sleet blew every way,—into your eyes, down your neck, in like a knife into your cheeks. I could feel the snow crunching in under the runners, crisp, turned to ice in a minute. I reached out to give Bess a cut on the neck, and the sleeve of my coat was stiff as pasteboard before I bent my elbow up again. ”

“ The ride (or walk, which I recommend, in preference, to good pedestrians) is a delightful one in early summer; and, even after the heats of August have browned the plain of the Akroteri, an early start from Canea will leave a memory of breezy upland with wide expanse of mountain and sea,—including some of the most picturesque views to be found in Crete,—and of the rich odors of many aromatic herbs and flowers, through whose rifled sweets the Akroteri is famous for its honey. ”

“ If love were not too cunning for that, what would become of the charming idyl, renewed in all its wonder and freshness for every generation? Let us be thankful that in every man's life there is a holiday of romance, an illumination of the senses by the soul, that makes him a poet while it lasts. Mr. Quincy caught the enchantment through his ears, a song of Burns heard from the next room conveying the infection,—a fact still inexplicable to him after lifelong meditation thereon, as he "was not very impressible by music"! ”

“ Let us hope that the scramble of democracy will give us something as good; anything of so classic dignity we shall not look to see again.
Josiah Quincy was no seeker of office; from first to last he and it were drawn together by the mutual attraction of need and fitness, and it clung to him as most men cling to it. The people often make blunders in their choice; they are apt to mistake presence of speech for presence of mind; they love so to help a man rise from the ranks, that they will spoil a good demagogue to make a bad general ”

“ It is time that fit honor should be paid also to him who shows a genius for public usefulness, for the achievement of character, who shapes his life to a certain classic proportion, and comes off conqueror on those inward fields where something more than mere talent is demanded for victory. The memory of such men should be cherished as the most precious inheritance which one generation can bequeath to the next. However it might be with popular favor, public respect followed Mr. Quincy unwaveringly for seventy years, and it was because he had never forfeited his own. ”

“ Johnny, that amuses me, that really does amuse me, for I never saw a young man nor a young woman either,—and young men and young women in general are very much like fresh-hatched chickens, to my mind, and know just about as much of the world, Johnny,—well, I never saw one yet who didn't say that very thing. And what's more, I never saw one who could get it into his head that old folks knew better. ”

“ Is our provincialism then in some great measure due to our absorption in the practical, as we politely call it, meaning the material,—to our habit of estimating greatness by the square mile and the hundredweight? Even during our war, in the midst of that almost unrivalled stress of soul, were not our speakers and newspapers so enslaved to the vulgar habit as to boast ten times of the thousands of square miles it covered with armed men, for once that they alluded to the motive that gave it all its meaning and its splendor? ”

“ Whence are those dull days which come so unexpectedly, and sometimes lead a troop of dull followers, to interrupt our life's work for a week at a time? Where are we to search for obstructions in the channels of the mind when ideas will not flow? How is it that, after a period of clearness and activity in thought, the brain grows indolent, and, without a feeling of illness, or even of fatigue, work lags and stops? By what right is it that, at times, each faculty in our possession seems to grow independent, and refuses to return to its task at our call? ”

“ Mary Ann's eyes were as big as saucers, and little Nancy was crying at the top of her lungs, with the baby tuning in, so we knew it was time to stop. But stopping wasn't ending; and folks can look things that they don't say.
We sat down to supper as glum as pump-handles; there were some fritters—I never knew anybody beat your mother at fritters—smoking hot off the stove, and some maple molasses in one of the best chiny teacups; I knew well enough it was just on purpose for my last night, but I never had a word to say, and Nancy crumbed up the children's bread with a jerk. ”

“ It may seem very queer to you, Johnny,—it did to me when I was your age, and didn't know any more than you do,—how folks can work themselves up into great quarrels out of such little things; but they do, and into worse, if it's a man who likes his own way, and a woman that knows how to talk. It's my opinion, two thirds of all the divorce cases in the law-books just grow up out of things no bigger than that lamp-wick. ”

“ But the time has come now for taking in all these waving things for the night, and the young men and girls of the shops are unhooking them with long poles, or handing them down from step-ladders planted in the middle of the sidewalk. Ranged outside the larger establishments are rows of headless dummies, intended to represent the female form divine, and to show off on their inanimate busts and shoulders the sweetest assortments ever seen of new things in summer fashions. These headless dummies of the Bowery have a very ghastly look at night. ”

“ And the welcome is no mere show of kindliness; the longer you stay at the convent, the better the monks are pleased, and staying longer than you intended is the highest compliment you can pay them. What change a larger acquaintance with the world will produce, of course I cannot say, or how much the spirit of hospitality will diminish by an increase of the calls on it; but now no English country-house makes you more at home than a Cretan convent. ”

“ Let a real tragedy be acted, and let men believe that a real scene is before them, and the theatre would be deserted. No audience in this country could bear the presentation of a natural and real tragedy. Men go to the theatre to be amused. The scenery, the music, the attitudes, the gesticulations, all unite to fix attention and amuse; but the eloquence, so called, of the theatre, is all factitious, and is no more adapted to the real occasions of life than would be the recitative in singing, and it pleases on the same principle that this does. ”

“ A stroke of genius that design was!—the sign of the three coffins, two of them sideways and one end; my father's name—Farewell Rollins, wery appropriate to his business as it turned out—in letters that they was modelled after silver screws."
"Three on 'em, two sideways and one end?" says John; "and the name, Farewell Rollins, shaped arter silver screws! Why, as you be a livin' cretur, you're the very—wery—little gal I was in love with; and many a day, dark enough otherwise with poverty and sorrer, you've lighted up with your purty golden head!" ”

“ It is the misfortune of American biography that it must needs be more or less provincial, and that, contrary to what might have been predicted, this quality in it predominates in proportion as the country grows larger. Wanting any great and acknowledged centre of national life and thought, our expansion has hitherto been rather aggregation than growth; reputations must be hammered out thin to cover so wide a surface, and the substance of most hardly holds out to the boundaries of a single State. ”

“ In Josiah Quincy we have an example of character trained and shaped, under the nearest approach to a pure democracy the world has ever seen, to a firmness, unity, and self-centred poise that recall the finer types of antiquity, in whom the public and private man was so wholly of a piece that they were truly everywhere at home, for the same sincerity of nature that dignified the hearth carried also a charm of homeliness into the forum. ”

“ They see only, or for the most part, its worst side. They are brought in contact with dishonesty and villany in their worst developments. I have observed, in doing business with lawyers, that they are exceedingly hawk-eyed, and jealous of everybody. The omission of a word or letter in a will, they will scan with the closest scrutiny; and while I could see no use for any but the most concise and simple terms to express the wishes of the testator, a lawyer would be satisfied with nothing but the most precise and formal instrument, stuffed full of legal caveats and technicalities. ”

“ If John Winthrop be the highest type of the men who shaped New England, we can find no better one of those whom New England has shaped than Josiah Quincy. It is a figure that we can contemplate with more than satisfaction,—a figure of admirable example in a democracy as that of a model citizen. ”

“ It was my first experience of a Turkish town, and perhaps I was more struck with the dilapidation and evident decay than I ought to have been. The sea-wall of the massive Venetian fortification seemed crumbling and carious; the earth-work above it was half washed away; the semicircle of houses on the Marina looked seedy and tottering; the Marina itself was in places under-cut and falling into the water ”

“ The only amusements for summer are a nargile on the Marina, studying primitive civilization the while, during the twilight hours, and the afternoon circuit of the ramparts, where every day at five o'clock an execrable band tortures the most familiar arias with clangor of discordant brass. From the ramparts we overlooked the plain, bounded by Mount Malaxa, above which loomed the Aspravouna, showing late in summer strips of snow in the ravines that furrowed the bare crystalline peaks, brown and gray and parched with the drought of three months. ”

“ She forgot herself and her ambitions,—the thought of shining in the great world died out in the presence of new visions of a future in which she was not to be her own,—of feelings in the depth of which the shallow vanities which had drawn her young eyes to them for a while seemed less than nothing. ”

“ We shall have to be content for a good while yet with our provincialism, and must strive to make the best of it. In it lies the germ of nationality, and that is, after all, the prime condition of all thorough-bred greatness of character. To this choicest fruit of a healthy life, well rooted in native soil, and drawing prosperous prices thence, nationality gives the keenest flavor. ”

“ Seldom has a life, itself actively associated with public affairs, spanned so wide a chasm for the imagination. Oglethorpe's offers a parallel,—the aide-de-camp of Prince Eugene calling on John Adams, American Ambassador to England. Most long lives resemble those threads of gossamer, the nearest approach to nothing unmeaningly prolonged, scarce visible pathway of some worm from his cradle to his grave; but Quincy's was strung with seventy active years, each one a rounded bead of usefulness and service. ”

“ Has not life itself perhaps become a little more prosaic than it once was? As the clearing away of the woods scants the streams, may not our civilization have dried up some feeders that helped to swell the current of individual and personal force? We have sometimes thought that the stricter definition and consequent seclusion from each other of the different callings in modern times, as it narrowed the chance of developing and giving variety to character, lessened also the interest of biography. ”

“ Stokes's oxen were fagged out, with their heads hanging down, and the horses were whinnying for their supper. Holt had one of his great brush-fires going,—there was nobody like Holt for making fires,—and the boys were hurrying round in their red shirts, shouting at the oxen, and singing a little, some of them low, under their breath, to keep their spirits up. There was snow as far as you could see,—down the cart-path, and all around, and away into the woods; and there was snow in the sky now, setting in for a regular nor'easter. ”

“ Elated by a little victory, he can only be depressed by a ruinous defeat; and such a defeat it is the solemn duty of the people to prepare for him. Even into his conceited brain must be driven the idea that his contemplated enterprise is hopeless, and that, in attempting to commit the greatest of political crimes, he would succeed only in committing the most enormous of political blunders. ”

“ Those were days, we are inclined to think, of more solid and elegant hospitality than our own,—the elegance of manners, at once more courtly and more frugal, of men who had better uses for wealth than merely to display it. Dinners have more courses now, and, like the Gascon in the old story, who could not see the town for the houses, we miss the real dinner in the multiplicity of its details. ”

“ The only method of preventing him from resisting impeachment by force, is an awakening of the people to the fact that the final battle against reviving rebellion is yet to be fought at the polls. Any apathy or divisions among Republicans in the State elections in October and November, resulting in a decrease of their vote, will embolden Mr. Johnson to venture his meditated coup d'état. He never will submit to be impeached and removed from office unless Congress is sustained by a majority of the people so great as to frighten him into submission. ”

“ Truly a savage might profess the art of agriculture in this fashion; for all this is only as if one were to say that the conditions of success in farming were to be where there were no earthquakes or avalanches, that is, to be quiet; to have the ground cleared of trees, that is, to have the mind free from cares and the shadows of sorrows; to have neither too much nor too little sunshine and rain, that is, to be properly fed ”