Various

“ The large-hearted old man forgot his scholastic theory of human nature as he looked upon her face. He thought he saw in her the dawning of that grace which some are born with; which some, like Myrtle, only reach through many trials and dangers; which some seem to show for a while and then lose; which too many never reach while they wear the robes of earth, but which speaks of the kingdom of heaven already begun in the heart of a child of earth. ”

“ The invigorating air of great moral principles must breathe through all our literature; it is the expanding spirit of the seventeenth century by which we must conquer now.
It is worth all that has been sacrificed in New England to vindicate this one fact, the supremacy of the moral nature. All culture, all art, without this, must be but rootless flowers, such as flaunt round a nation's decay. ”

“ Across the water, this tendency seems to increase. Just as an Englishman is ashamed to speak well, and pooh-poohs all oratory, so he is growing ashamed even to write well, at least in anything beyond a newspaper; and we on this side have emancipated our tongues more than our pens. What stands between Americans and good writing is usually want of culture; we write as well as we know how, while in England the obstacle seems to be merely a boorish whim. The style of English books and magazines is growing far less careful than ours,—less finished, less harmonious, more slipshod, more slangy. ”

“ In what awful lines of light has this truth been lately written against the sky! What graces might there not have been in that Southern society before the war? It had ease, affluence, leisure, polished manners, European culture,—all worthless; it produced not a book, not a painting, not a statue; it concentrated itself on politics, and failed; then on war, and failed; it is dead and vanished, leaving only memories of wrong behind. Let us not be too exultant; the hasty wealth of New York may do as little. Intellect in this age is not to be found in the circles of fashion ”

“ The map was more than fifty years old, and drawn in the style of two centuries ago, with groups of houses for the villages, and long files of conical peaks for the mountains. The woman brought it down, yellow and dusty, from a dark garret over the shop, and seemed as delighted with the sale as if she had received money for useless stock. In the streets, the people inspected me curiously, as a stranger, but were always ready to go out of their way to guide me. The ground-floor being always open, all the features of domestic life and of mechanical labor are exposed to the public. ”

“ Words afford a more delicious music than the chords of any instrument; they are susceptible of richer colors than any painter's palette; and that they should be used merely for the transportation of intelligence, as a wheelbarrow carries brick, is not enough. The highest aspect of literature assimilates it to painting and music. Beyond and above all the domain of use lies beauty, and to aim at this makes literature an art. ”

“ His early solitude narrowed his affinities, and gave a kind of bloodlessness to his style; clear in hue, fine in texture, it is apt to want the mellow tinge which indicates a robust and copious life. Even such a criticism seems daring, in respect to anything so beautiful; and I can conceive of no other defect in the style of Hawthorne.
Perhaps the conclusion of the whole matter may seem to be that literary art is so lofty a thing as to be beyond the reach of any of us; as the sage in Rasselas, discoursing on poetry, only convinces his hearers that no one ever can be a poet. ”

“ The cells where the living died, and this pile which tells how the memory of the dead yet lives, are the last objects on our route that have any association with the things of this outer world; these are the pillars that mark the beginning of a realm devoid of human association,—its Pillars of Hercules, beyond which is a silent waste whose darkness breeds the wildest mysteries. ”

“ I know of nothing but that aim which is the climax and flower of all civilization, without which purity itself grows dull and devotion tedious,—the pursuit of Science and Art. Give to all this nation peace, freedom, prosperity, and even virtue, still there must be some absorbing interest, some career. That career can be sought only in two directions,—more and yet more material prosperity on the one side. Science and Art on the other. Every man's aim must either be riches, or something better than riches. ”

“ He depresses the mind, rather than invigorates it. The eye he cast on human life was not the eye of a sympathizing poet, but rather that of a sagacious cynic. His observation, though sharp, close, and vigilant, is somewhat ironic and unfeeling. His penetrating, incisive intellect cuts its way to the heart of a character as with a knife; and if he lays bare its throbs of guilt and weakness, and lets you into the secrets of its organization, he conceives his whole work is performed. ”

“ Chapman was a man with great elements in his nature, which were so imperfectly harmonized that what he was found but a stuttering expression in what he wrote and did. There were gaps in his mind; or, to use Victor Hugo's image, "his intellect was a book with some leaves torn out." His force, great as it was, was that of an Ajax, rather than that of an Achilles. Few dramatists of the time afford nobler passages of description and reflection. Few are wiser, deeper, manlier in their strain of thinking. ”

“ If there is a window broken within the radius of two miles from our house, Johnny's ball, or a stone known to come from his dexterous hand, is almost certain to be found in the battered premises. I never hear the musical jingling of splintered glass, but my porte-monnaie gives a convulsive throb in my breast-pocket. There is not a doorstep in our street that hasn't borne evidences in red chalk of his artistic ability; there isn't a bell that he hasn't rung and run away from at least three hundred times. ”

“ All this time a most wonderful and mysterious process is going on. That gentle current of electricity, noiseless and invisible as it is, is taking the silver held in the solution, and laying it upon the surfaces of those vessels, within and without; and at the same time it is decomposing the plates of silver hanging along the sides of the trough in such a way as to keep up the strength of the solution. We cannot recover from the wonder into which the contemplation of this process threw us. There are some things which the outside and occasional observer can never be done marvelling at. ”

“ But the true use of Greek literature is perpetually to remind us what a wondrous thing literary art may be,—capable of what range of resources, of what thoroughness in structure, of what perfection in detail. It is a remarkable fact, that the most [Pg 751] penetrating and fearless of all our writers, Thoreau,—he who made Nature his sole mistress, and shook himself utterly free from human tradition,—yet clung to Greek literature as the one achievement of man that seemed worthy to take rank with Nature, pronouncing it "as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself." ”

“ They all went up to Myrtle and congratulated her on her change of fortune. Even Cynthia Badlam got out a phrase or two which passed muster in the midst of the general excitement. As for Kitty Fagan, she could not say a word, but caught Myrtle's hand and kissed it as if it belonged to her own saint, and then, suddenly applying her apron to her eyes, retreated from a scene which was too much for her, in a state of complete mental beatitude and total bodily discomfiture. ”

“ Solitary farm-houses, each as massive as the tower of a fortress and of the color of sunburnt gold, studded the heights, overlooking the long slopes of almond-orchards. I looked about for water, in order to make a sketch of the scene; but the bed of the brook was as dry as the highway. The nearest house toward the plain had a splendid sentinel palm beside its door,—a dream of Egypt, which beckoned and drew me towards it with a glamour I could not resist. ”

“ Far up, on a higher plateau between the peaks, I saw the church-tower of Valdemosa. The sides of the mountains were terraced with almost incredible labor, walls massive as the rock itself being raised to a height of thirty feet, to gain a shelf of soil two or three yards in breadth. Where the olive and the carob ceased, box and ilex took possession of the inaccessible points, carrying up the long waves of vegetation until their foam-sprinkles of silver-gray faded out among the highest clefts. ”

“ Scarcely a day passes but he falls out of something, or over something, or into something. A ladder running up to the dizzy roof of an unfinished building is no more to be resisted by him than the back platform of a horse-car, when the conductor is collecting his fare in front.
I should not like to enumerate the battles that Johnny has fought during the past eight months. It is a physical impossibility, I should judge, for him to refuse a challenge. He picks his enemies out of all ranks of society. ”

“ He thought of all that a maddened nature can imagine to deaden its own intolerable anguish. Of revenge. If Myrtle rejected his suit, should he take her life on the spot, that she might never be another's,—that neither man nor woman should ever triumph over him,—the proud, ambitious man, defeated, humbled, scorned? ”

“ How great the power of an habitual under-statement, on which in due season one strong thought rises like an ocean-crest, and breaks, and sweeps onward, lavishing itself in splendor! What a glorious gift of heaven would have been the style of Ruskin, for instance, could he but have contained himself, and put forth only half his strength, instead of always planting, in the words of old Fuller, "a piece of ordnance to batter down an aspen-leaf"! ”

“ For the Pacific Railroad is not simply a gigantic public work, it is the world's great highway. The world has had several grand routes, along the line of which, for certain periods of time, the life-blood and intelligence of humanity have coursed. Such was the route which history discloses as the most ancient from India overland to the Mediterranean, whence it was continued by that old Phœnician Coast Navigation Company to the shores of Britain. ”

“ We have the evidence of all of our senses to prove to us the nature of an object. It tastes or smells or vibrates or is colored; the varied sensations thus awakened combining to give us our totality of conception. The rose reflects light-waves which the eye feels red; it emits oil-particles which the nose feels fragrant; it touches our tongue, and feels pleasantly; it touches our fingers, and feels soft and smooth. It exists in nature as a physical structure, and its existence is evident to us through the various sensations it creates in different nerves of our bodies, and through them alone. ”

“ It is a square edifice, with light Gothic towers at the corners, displaying little ornamental sculpture, but nevertheless a taste and symmetry, in all its details, which are very rare in Spanish architecture. The interior is a single vast hall, with a groined roof, resting on six pillars of exquisite beauty. They are sixty feet high, and fluted spirally from top to bottom, like a twisted cord, with a diameter of not more than two feet and a half. ”