Various

“ But at your age everything is a beginning. While we are young, no matter how dark the sky is, the future looks bright; to-morrow is always full of hope and glad surprises when we are young.”
“I don’t feel as if I were young,” said Clide; “it seems to me as if I had outlived my youth. You know there are experiences that do the work of years quite as well as time; that make us old prematurely?”
“I know it, I can believe it,” replied Raymond; “but nevertheless the spring of youth remains. It only wants the help of time to heal its wounds and restore its power of working and enjoying.” ”

“ Creation by law is an absurdity, since law is but the expression of the regularity of phenomena, once the fact of the universe has been granted. Unbeginning and unending series are not only an absurdity, but a palpable evasion of the difficulty. We have, therefore, according to Dr. Draper, a tremendous effect without a cause. When we view the many-sided spectacle of nature, the star-bespangled empyrean, the endless forms of life which the microscope reveals, the harmony and order of the universe, we naturally inquire, Whence sprang this mighty panorama? What all-potent Being gave it existence? ”

“ The spot which this new life has chosen for its home is suggestive rather of the past than of the future. A tiny brick cottage, with a thatched roof overgrown with mosses green and brown, a quaint remnant of old-fashioned life, a bit of picturesque long ago forgotten on the skirts of the red-tiled, gas-lit, prosperous modern town of Dullerton. The little brick box, smothered in its lichens and mosses, was called The Lilies from a band of those majestic flowers that dwelt on either side of the garden-wicket, like guardian angels of the place, looking out in serene beauty on the world without. ”

“ Thousands of ex-soldiers will fight their battles over again with this book—will lose themselves in the great mass of the army—will struggle once more against that sickening sensation which their sense of honor overcame as the first bullet whistled by, the first pale, senseless form was borne to the rear on the bloody stretcher—will tingle again in every nerve at the first sight of the Southerners—will feel the sudden thrill of the fearful excitement of the rush, or of the stubborn defence, or the ecstasy of victory. ”

“ One cannot visit the old castle of Lectoure, with its thousand memories, without emotion. It is now a hospital. Charity has taken the place of brutality and lawless passion. Looking off from the walls over the pleasant valley below, watered by streams and divided by long lines of trees, we hear the song of the peaceful laborer instead of the battle-cry of the olden time, and the lowing of the fawn-colored Gascon cattle instead of the neighing of war-horses. ”

“ A mightier multitude would listen to his strong and mellow voice. The descendants of the men into whose bruised and downcast hearts he first breathed the hope and the ardor of liberty have built up a greater Ireland in America. Sharing in the glories and faithful to the traditions of American freedom—yielding to none in the duties of citizenship—they have yet carried with them, and handed down to their sons, that love of the mother country which seems ever to burn with a brighter flame in man’s heart in enforced or unmerited exile. ”

“ Is it to be said that it costs less time and labor to bring a soul to spiritual maturity, to raise it to the perfection of this divine life? A day, a year—will they suffice to enlighten the intelligence with truths it must believe, to instruct it in obligations it must fulfil, but, above all, to form in it a habit of all those virtues it is bound to practise? Or is its education so different from the natural education that it can dispense with an instructor? Will the child, unaided, raise itself to God—we mean to the highest degree of moral perfection, of Christian sanctity? ”

“ What should our good or our evil count against the great Spirit, whom we are told lives up above there in the passionless calm of a fixed eternity? Did we shake our puny fists for ever in the face of that broad, bent heaven that wrapped us in and overwhelmed us in its folds, what effect would it have? If we held them up in prayer, what profited it? Who of men could storm heaven or search hell? ”

“ You talk of being cursed; we make our own curses. We commit follies and sins, and we have to pay for it, and then we call it destiny! It is your own misdoing that is hunting you. You thought to make life into a holiday; to shirk every duty, everything that was the least irksome or distasteful; you flew in the face of common-sense, and family dignity, and all the responsibilities of life in your marriage; you rushed into the most solemn act of a man’s life with about as much decency and reverence as a masquerader at a fancy ball. ”

“ Years have passed since then, and I can write all this calmly enough now; but only those—and God grant that they may be few!—who at a moment’s warning, or at any warning, have had to cross more than a thousand miles of ocean in the hope of catching a dying parent’s last breath, can tell how the days pall and the sleepless nights drag on; how the sky expands into a mighty shroud covering one dear object, of which the sad eyes never lose the sight; how the winds, roar they loud or sing they softly, breathe ever the same low, monotonous dirge. ”

“ And yet, as Kenneth said, a life that could not end was an awful thing. That the existence we feel within us is never to cease; that the power of discriminating between good and evil, define them, laugh at them or quibble about them as we may, can never die out of us; that we are irresistibly impelled to one or the other; that they are always knocking at the door of our hearts, for we feel them there; that they cannot be blind influences, knowing not when to come or when to go, but the voices of keen intelligences acting over the great universe, wherever man lives and moves and has his being ”

“ In the Book of Psalms there is something profitable for all; it is a sort of universal medicine and preservative of health. Whoever will read therein may be sure to find the proper remedy for the diseased passion he suffers from. Psalmody is the blessing of the people, a thanksgiving of the multitude, the delight of numbers, and a language for all. It is the voice of the Church, the sweetly-loud profession of faith, the full-voiced worship of men in power, the delight of the free, the shout of the joyous, the exultation of the merry. ”

“ Such are those who have failed, who have missed life’s meaning and cast away their chances—youthful philosophers who have been crossed in love, or voluptuaries of threescore and ten. But to high-hearted youth the world holds up a magic mirror, wherein he sees a fairy landscape full of harmony, and peace, and beauty, and love, all grouped around a central figure surpassing all, beautifying all—himself and his destiny! ”

“ A great realm of fiction unfolded itself before me—a realm all my own, a fairy island in a summer sea, peopled with Calibans and dainty Ariels, Mirandas and Ferdinands, and a thousand unseen creatures, waiting only for the wave of my magic wand to be summoned into the beauty of life, to bring sweet songs down from the clouds of heaven, and whisperings of spirits far away that the earth had never yet heard. ”

“ It happened—of course by chance, unless that far-sighted old Angélique had a hand in it—that Clide was seated next to her; and as the leg of the long table made a space between her and Sir Simon, it was natural that the two young people should be thrown on their own resources for conversation, while their elders at the other end talked incessantly of old times and people that neither Clide nor Franceline cared about. It was the first time in her life that she found herself the object of direct homage and attention from a young yet mature man, and the experience was decidedly pleasant. ”

“ I had never seen her before, but I needed no ghost to tell me that she was Kenneth’s sister.
“This is Elfie, Roger,” said Fairy. “She wants to welcome you too. Elfie is my sister. I stole her. Oh! a sister is so much nicer than a great rough brother who runs away!”
“And this,” said Mrs. Goodal, leading forward a tall, spare gentleman, with that closely shaven face and quiet lip and eye that, with or without the conventional garb, stamp the Catholic priest all the world over—“this is our dear friend and father, the friend and father of all of us, Father Fenton.” ”

“ There was in truth a presence near him, and a voice sounding from afar, murmuring those notes of memory which are the mother-tongue of the soul, subtle, persuasive, irresistible; accents that live when we have forgotten languages acquired with mature choice and arduous study; a presence that clings to us through life, and reveals itself when we have the will and the gift to see and to recognize it. That power is mostly the purchase of a great pain ”

“ A duel to the death is always brief: the foes close in mortal conflict; the thrusts come fast and sharp; one or other falls. When Franceline lifted her head from her arms, the expression of the tear-stained face showed which way the battle had gone: the victor stood erect with his foot upon the victim’s neck, unscathed, serene, and pitiless. Love lay bleeding and maimed, but Conscience smiled in triumph. ”

“ There is no sentiment in the human heart more potent than veneration, especially as its objects ascend in the scale of greatness. Man’s first impulse is to bow the head before the grandeur of nature’s mighty spectacles, before the rushing cataract and the sweeping storm, and to adore the Being whose voice is heard in the tempest, who dwells in a canopy of clouds and rides on the wings of the wind. ”

“ It is the dream of more than one liberal, simple enough to believe a perfect equilibrium of human passions to be possible in society, by the sole force of nature and reason. But experience soon dissipates the illusion of so fair a dream. All the degrees of separation between religion and society are soon traversed up to the last, wherein the state, no longer acknowledging creed, church, or religion, announces itself atheist, and forces consciences to the inflexible level of an impious legislation. From thence there is but a step to the proscription of Catholics, and to open persecution. ”

“ No fatigue, no fear of contagion, the sight of no misery, affected Stella’s courage; no labor wearied her patience, no application or effort was beyond her ability and perseverance. For souls thus constituted it is a genuine pleasure to exercise their noble faculties and be able to satisfy the thirst for doing good that devours them. Her eyes, therefore, soon began to brighten, her face to grow animated, and from time to time, like a reflection of the past, her lips to expand with the charming smile of former days. ”

“ For though it be true that tunes and other works of art in music are so far things by themselves as to be capable of being written in notation, and thus preserved, still it seems impossible that mere tunes and mere music should answer to the divine idea of sacred song.
When music has ceased to be mere sound; when it has been taken up by the feelings and living intelligence of the human heart and mind; when these have wedded it to themselves, have created in it a dwelling-place and a home, and out of it have formed for themselves a second language and range of expression ”

“ Could you find a sweeter perfume in all the world than steals up from my own garden here, where all the flowers are mine, and I sometimes think half know me? All around is beauty and peace, and has been so ever since I was a child. ”

“ She was tall and lank, and wore a black silk wig, pasted in melancholy braids on either side of her face—a perfect foil to the gay little curls that danced on Miss Merrywig’s forehead like so many little bells keeping time to her tongue. Miss Bulpit was enthroned on a pedestal of one thousand five hundred pounds a year, and attended by all the substantial honors that spring from such a foundation. She was fully alive to the advantages of her position, and had never married from the fear of being sought more for her money than for herself. ”

“ If I belonged to any religion at all, I belonged to that in which I had been brought up. For a young gentleman who professed to be so anxious to do what was right, the duty of obedience to his father in a matter where of all things that father was surely entitled to obedience, and where the effort to obey cost so little, where the result as regarded others could not but be satisfactory, not to say exemplary, looked remarkably like an opportunity of regulating one’s conduct by the best of rules at once. ”

“ No human legislation, be it ever so wise, can cope with this divine legislator; none other can take the sting out of defeat, can make the conquerors loved by the conquered, and turn the chains of captivity from iron to silk. Even on the lowest ground, in mere self-interest, governments would do well to constitute themselves the standard-bearers of the King who rules by love, and subdues the stubborn pride of men by first winning their hearts. ”

“ But there are others, inflamed not with a love of Ireland, but with a spirit of hostility to all governments, who would plunge their country into bloodshed in hope of themselves floating to the top. These men are infected with the spirit of the Commune. They are revolutionists—not in the sense in which Washington or Hampden or O’Connell were revolutionists—leaders of great movements for the liberties of peoples—but socialists, whose single incentive is the envy and hatred of all superior authority. Most of all, they desire to supplant the Irish priesthood as the guides of the people. ”

“ We are thrust aside by a procession hurrying off to the station, joyously singing some song of praise, and we turn for a moment into a soft green meadow on the banks of the river, with pleasant winding paths among umbrageous trees, leading to an immense ring with rustic roof and open sides, provided with seats and tables of beautiful Pyrenean marble—where pilgrims can rest and take their lunch—the gift of M. Henri Lasserre, the author of “Our Lady of Lourdes,” so admirably translated for The Catholic World. ”

“ Everything here is solemn and mysterious, and inclines one to serious reflection. On the pillars hang the different scenes of the great Passion in which we all had so sad a part. They strike new terror into the soul in this sepulchral church that seems hewn out of the living rock. ”

“ The undeniable fact that Protestantism has never been able permanently to maintain a single community of women, either for contemplation or benevolence, proves that the Catholic Church alone is the sphere in which woman’s religious zeal finds its fullest and most complete expression; that it is the Catholic faith alone which thoroughly arouses and solidly supports the enthusiasm of her nature, and embodies her ardor into a useful and enduring form. ”

“ Yes, for the souls who desire God the false interests of the state are but a glebe—a glebe the laws to which the conscience refuses to submit—a glebe the will of the sovereign, and a glebe also the traditions of his dynasty.
These people, let others call them free, and, on the faith of their lords, let them also call themselves free; they are none the less people in serfdom—souls chained to the glebe. ”