Various

“ The smoke must not blind us; the crash and the roar must not deafen us; through the agony of souls, despair, and hate, and sin, we must have our vision clear and strong to recognize the loveliness of virtue, the divine beauty of sacrifice, the infinite possibilities of repentance, the joy of the conquerors, the sweetness of the kiss of peace. Loving all love. Hating all hate. We must see angels outnumbering fiends in incalculable degree, light triumphing over darkness, and the breath of purity healing the blue corruption of the world. ”

“ Alphonse, his wife, by her affection and virtue, a sixth daughter; Cécile and her charming children, a third generation of hearts that love and must be loved! And then those who are wanting, but who follow me like my shadow in the Alley of Meditation! Alas! my Césarine, my pride on account of her marvellous beauty, buried far away behind that Alpine horizon which continually recalls her remembrance! Alas! my Suzanne, the saint who wore too soon the aureola on her brow, and whom God took from me that her memory might be for me an image of one of his angels of purity! ”

“ We go to a place, we learn to admire it, we remember it with pleasure, we almost begin to have associations with it and its surroundings, it grows in fact into our soul’s history, and makes itself a place in our life. We leave it, and never see it again. We have the regret of having seen and felt beauty that is not for us, we have longed for what we could not have, we have dreamed of utopias that were never to be realized, and we have prepared for ourselves a nest of disappointments for the future. ”

“ Is not the Christian religion a system of things invisible, visibly manifested? The end of religion is spiritual, but in order to attain this end it must possess a visible and material element. This fact of itself gives to art a religious mission of the highest order.
This mission is to proclaim to the world Jesus Christ and him crucified and glorified—by poetry, by song, by painting, by architecture, in a word, by every artistic creation of which genius is capable.
Jesus Christ is the beau ideal of art—the most lovely and beautiful conception of the divine mind itself. ”

“ Their intellects were plunged in the same bath of learning, and tempered in the furnace of the time. They unite in regretting the trustful past, and complain that they were born too late into a sick and decrepit world. They pace together the shore of life, and gaze with wistful eyes over the expanse of ocean. But here the parallel ends. Their roads diverge in youth. Each obeys a different impulse, and learns a different lesson. The one hears a growing harmony in the voices of science, and perceives an increasing purpose in the movement of mankind. ”

“ The poet comes. His mission is to chain the fleeting, to fix the evanescent, to reproduce the past. He brings you a rose with the bloom on it; calls up the buried friend; stays the sinking sun on the edge of his western bed. His life is a long revolt against the law of change. Nor is he confined to imitation. His sphere transcends realities. He may play with nature, if he will not violate her. ”

“ Opposition is its touchstone, elicits its latent powers, displays them in their modest and unborrowed beauty, making us regard their possessor with feelings akin to those with which we behold a gallant ship that has just ridden out a violent tempest, or the conqueror who, having waded, in calm courage, through a sea of blood, conducts his triumphant legions through the captured provinces to survey the rich spoils of victory. Fortitude may be considered the lion-virtue of the human breast. ”

“ The age is one of chaos. Never before since the world began were there such wild ruin and devastation; never such terrible levelling to the ground of human grandeur; never such savage smashing up of the monuments of luxury and worldly greatness. It would, indeed, be difficult to describe adequately what is so confused and so chaotic. When the storm-clouds have gathered and overshadowed us with darkness, when the lightning-fires flame through the sky and scathe the forest-trees, and the blinding raindrops drive in fury through the air, can we see any order in it all? ”

“ Science indeed is like a luminous mountain composed of many a height, some more elevated than others. As we mount, the horizon expands, and we are able to embrace with the same glance a vaster space. He alone will possess complete science, and he alone consequently will deserve, in its absolute sense, the title of a man of science, who arrived at its loftiest height, and grasping in its infinite simplicity the first principle of all things, shall behold in the splendor of this focus all the rays which burst forth from it and spread abroad to illumine the whole sphere of truth. ”

“ The only places we should care to revisit are those where we stayed long enough to make them feel like home. Innsbruck is certainly one that recalls many touching domestic scenes, many of those little memories which, like a daisy-chain, bind life together, childhood and youth, sickness and health, trouble and joy—frail links, but so fair, begun in early childhood and winding themselves round the heart, through the vicissitudes of many years, the wanderings in many lands, and, above all, through the intangible changes of a restless mind and soul. ”

“ If Paris were sovereign, peace would be no more, and truth would leave the earth, dismayed. The very opposite, of Rome, its spirit is one of fever, catching even to the calmest pulse of a law-abiding and metaphysical northerner—a spirit that broods over one like the blast of a furnace, and bewilders like the breath of a coming simoom. We have experienced it ourselves in days long before the last great judgment that has crushed the unhappy city ”

“ A child of the sun, of the clear free air, with wealth in his fields and the great ocean smiling all around his coast, where the ships of all nations come to lade and unlade, he yearns for the freedom which strangers hold so carelessly, and is ready to fight and to die for it. So Andalusia is the hotbed of revolution. As the Biscayan is famed for his unyielding nature, the Gallego for his stupidity, so is the Andaluz for his wit. He speaks rapidly and with many gestures, clipping his words—a grave sin against the sonorous Castilian. ”

“ Why does the deserted Palatine look to-day upon the opposite hill of the Vatican, and behold there a dome whose summit may well be said to seek to scale the heavens—a dome that crowns a tomb, that of the beggar Peter, a tomb which, though but the fane of the dead, is nevertheless the centre of Europe and the world? For this tomb bears a throne at once the most ancient and the most sacred in Europe, the only one which represents an empire whose boundaries are the boundaries of the universe. ”

“ If we should be asked to expound the philosophy of this noble instinct, we should be obliged, we apprehend, either to mystify what is self-evident, or super-illustrate it by the equally undemonstrable fact that greatness of character challenges universal admiration. It is like the golden sunset of Italy, or the many-tinted beauty of the rainbow. We feel, one and all, impelled to do it unsolicited homage. ”

“ Foreigners would rather leave Berlin and Vienna unvisited than miss a week at Munich; and a stay among its galleries, libraries, and museums, is part of the education of every travelled man. It has its literary, its fashionable, and its diplomatic circles, and, strangely enough, each of these pronounces it an equally agreeable resort. The cultivated world filters through it all the year round, and, like Geneva and Rome, though perhaps in a lesser degree than either, one might stay there a lifetime and yet see the whole panorama of intellectual Europe unrolled at intervals before one’s eyes. ”

“ In place of profaning your lyre by songs which awake in hearts nothing but the lowest desires and most guilty passions, would it not be worthier of you to avail yourselves of this irresistible power of seduction which you exercise over your brothers, in drawing them in your train to the pursuit of true beauty? Do you alone fail to perceive the forfeiture which threatens your genius from the moment that it denies to truth the glorious testimony which truth demands of it? Do you not see that the beauty of forms fails you from the time that you seek it outside of the beauty of thoughts? ”

“ In the temple of outward nature poetry is only the acolyte of painting. But one shrine is more exclusively her own. She is mistress of the heart. Over that ocean no other wing sustains continuous flight. There are waves of impulse which canvas cannot reflect, and currents of emotion untraced by the limner’s skill. There are dainty joys and fears that mock his grasp, and gust of passion that confound his cunning. Pictorial art must read the soul in the face, and the face is at best a clouded mirror. From the poet we hide nothing. ”

“ When the mother for the first time feels her first-born’s breath, in tenderness of gratitude she pronounces the name of God; when in utter helplessness of woe she bends over the grave of her only child, and her heart is breaking, she can find no relief for her agonizing soul, until, raising her tearful eyes to heaven, she breathes in prayer the name of God.
When two young hearts that are one vow eternal love and fealty, it is in the name of God they do it; and the union of love loses half its poetry and half its charm except it be contracted before the altar of God and in his holy name. ”

“ We love our country, and none dare question our love but they who would have the statute-books bristle with laws against us such as the genius of our institutions forbids and the fathers of the Republic rejected. Let us show our love for it by mingling the memories of all that is dear to us in the career of our religion with all that is noble and inspiring in the civil history of our land, our fair heritage of political and religious freedom. ”

“ A revolution brews like an angry storm, all in silence; and bursts; and a nation is shivered into fragments. Men are amazed; they have made a false reckoning; but the storm has brewed under the eye of God, and gathered its hidden forces, and burst at the very moment that God allowed it, and the havoc has been done up to the time which he has marked out. This is the expression of a great Catholic principle of history which it is well, especially in this age of godless theories, to keep constantly before our minds. ”

“ The broad river of woman’s influence, flowing so calmly and majestically through the centuries of the church’s undisturbed unity, has been dammed up by the Protestant tradition of the last three hundred years, till it has broken forth again as a turbulent torrent, devastating where it once fertilized, disturbing where once it conciliated. In its new form and its strange aggressiveness, it now horrifies mankind, where in early days, in its legitimate sphere, it guided the greatest statesmen, orators, and saints, and gravely helped them on the road to heaven, to science, and to happiness. ”

“ If he showed his power and wisdom, when with sovereign hand he caused the splendors of the heavens to radiate from the womb of chaos with the harmony of the stars and the life of nature, how much wiser and more powerful does he not seem to us when we behold him making use of a chaos a thousand times more rebellious, the chaos of the passions and perverseness of humanity, in order to produce the most beautiful of all his works—the manifestation of his truth and the triumph of his goodness! ”

“ As you never spend more than two short winter months in the city, where alone the life-pulse of our century can be felt beating, you remain unacquainted with the present and its spirit. The rest of the year you pass in riding about on your lands, suffering yourself to be impressed by the stern rigor of nature’s laws, and concluding that human society harmonizes in the same manner with the behests of fixed principles. I shall have to brush you up a little. I shall have to let you into the mysteries of progress, so that you may cease groping like a blind man in the noonday of enlightenment. ”

“ Let them never forget the lofty mission of art, and that the form is merely a garb and outfit to clothe the moral idea. For beauty is the perfection of being, perceived by the spirit, felt in the heart, and its handmaid is truth, represented with love. And, without doubt, for him whose aim is truth, the best way of finding it is in subjects and deeds of religion. Let us banish, then, indifference, which slays love and genius alike, and that cold calculation which smothers trustful faith. ”

“ The life of man is short, even that of a nation is not long; but art dies not, and has moreover the divine power of conferring immortality upon all that it touches. Shakespeare is worth more to the glory of England than all the victories of all her generals. Dante, Raphael, and Michael Angelo, with innumerable other names which represent the highest artistic power, have made Italy the consecrated land of poetry and of song, the home of beauty and of all loveliness—the native country of the soul. ”

“ How true is it that the Catholic Church alone is the Mother of Heroes! The heroism of the martyrs was of that kind for which all ordinary theories fail to account. It gave strength to the tottering frames of venerable old men; it made timid virgins courageous in the presence of hideous racks; it spoke by the lisping tongues of frail infants. Let the profane historian point to any scene that can equal in simple grandeur the trial and death of the gentle, sweet St. Agnes, or in heroic endurance the painful, slow martyrdom of the beautiful Agatha, the glory of Sicilian virgins. ”