Various

“ In that charmed circle every one was either a genius destined yet to move the world, or a genius too great for the dull, unworthy world to comprehend. It was a happy circle, where success or failure came to just the same.
All in a flutter of delight was Mary Blanchet when preparing to enter that magical circle. She was going at last to meet great men and brilliant women. Perhaps, some day, she might even come to be known among them—to shine among them. She could never be done embracing Minola for having brought her to the gate of that heaven. ”

“ They got much consolation from a certain set of preachers, who assured them it was all right—"Laws of trade, you know," "cheap shoes good for the masses," "water will find its level," "the masses in Africa will now be able to wear shoes," "the best government is no government," "all one great brotherhood," "every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost."
Paradise was just beyond their noses, and it lay just here: "When things get very cheap every man will only work three hours a day. All men can play the rest of the time, or they can cultivate their minds!" ”

“ England has been called the purgatory of horses and the paradise of women. But that saying came from the continent of Europe, where women, except in the very highest and most cultivated classes, are not treated with that tenderness and consideration for their weakness and their womanly functions which I am inclined to think is somewhat peculiar to the English race. I should call England the paradise of men; for there the world is made for them; and women are happy in making it so. An Englishman who is the head of a family is not only master of his house, but of the whole household. ”

“ Melvyna Sawyer was born in Vermont, and, by one of the strange chances of this vast, many-raced, motley country of ours, she had travelled south as nurse, and a very good, energetic nurse too, albeit somewhat sharp-voiced, to a delicate young wife, who had died in the sunny land, as so many of them die; the sun, with all his good will and with all his shining, not being able to undo in three months the work of long years of the snows and the bleak east winds of New England. ”

“ The history of parties in England and the United States shows that any party long in power will become corrupt. To rely upon any party, or the wisdom or sense of justice of any government, for protection of property or guaranty of civil or religious liberty, is to lean upon a broken reed; for rights never enforce themselves, and are soon gone unless sustained by more potent means than the justice or honor of those in power. A President is impotent of himself, soon passes into private life, and is at best but a man. ”

“ At this moment, to-day, this year of our Lord 1877, the merchant princes of London, the manufacturing barons of Manchester are at their wits' ends; for people refuse to buy the products of their mills. Germany will not have them, and France will not, and America chooses to make her own; and even India, ungrateful that she is, has gone to spinning her own cotton. Mills are being closed in England, furnaces are blown out, wages are reduced, and workmen are threatening to strike, or have struck, and are settling down for a comfortable winter upon the rates. ”

“ And yet, far more truly than many a martyr, Byron and Heine gave their lives for us. Not, indeed, in the professed spirit of the martyr, not purposing the sacrifice, but for that very reason making it the more significant. They experimented lavishly, daringly with life, and in their poems they give us real life as no other poets since have done. They are real passion, real thought, the ruddy drops of the sad heart. Heine's "Book of Songs" is his own body and blood. One feels of it what Whitman says of his "Leaves of Grass": "This is no book; who touches this touches a man." ”

“ It is true that, though I myself confess to being such a reader, there are moments when I grow rather weary of M. Sarcey, who has in an eminent degree both the virtues and the defects which attach to the great French characteristic—the habit of taking terribly au sérieux anything that you may set about doing. Of this habit of abounding in one's own cause, of expatiating, elaborating, reiterating, refining, as if for the hour the fate of mankind were bound up with one's particular topic, M. Sarcey is a capital and at times an almost comical representative. ”

“ England has "developed her resources," and trade is free. Let her sing hosannahs, and cry, "Glory be to our god," for no such beautiful "progress" was ever seen on earth before.
What is to happen to the 300,000 or half million land-owners of England, if outside pig-headed peoples wilfully and maliciously refuse to buy the mill products of England and so to feed the 37,200,000 people of England who have no land upon which to raise their own food? What is to happen if some fine day the 37,200,000 take it into their foolish heads to say:
"We do not like to starve. We are many, you are few. ”

“ Miss Grey said; "but I know so little that I ought not to offer a word of advice."
"Oh, yes, I should trust to your feelings and instincts in such a case. Well, I don't like, somehow, being in the hands of politicians and party men, who might use me and my cause only as a means of annoying the Government—not really from any sense of right and justice. I don't know if I make myself quite understood; it is hard to expect a lady, especially a young lady, to understand these things."
"I think I can quite understand all that. We are not so stupid as you seem to suppose, Mr. Heron." ”

“ It is all about Sidonie, who may be called its heroine, as Becky Sharp is the heroine of "Vanity Fair." Now Sidonie is a pretty, vulgar, vile-souled shop girl who uses her beauty to make her way to a certain sort of bourgeois fashionable life, but who is really a far more infamous creature than many a common harlot. For she is not wanton; she is not merely venal; she is pitilessly selfish and fiendishly malicious. She has no honesty of any kind—of mind, heart, soul, or body. A baser, viler creature in female, and therefore in human form, it would be impossible to conceive. ”

“ And Heine and Byron, in giving their lives for us, did what the greatest poets and the strongest men have seldom done. Though they have always suffered, yet for us these have rather toiled than suffered. Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe—what exalted, what demiurgic creations have they bequeathed to us, what power to move, what beauty to ponder with unapproachable longing! But these creations have an awing beauty; they keep an unattainable distance and height. ”

“ People who would take part in a carnival now would dance upon the borders of their own open graves. And what do we want of a carnival, even if we were prosperous? Carnivals are not suited to our national traits. They suit the Latin races of the south of Europe; and even among them they are fading away before the light of diffused intelligence and the thoughtfulness that comes of knowledge. To us they are entirely foreign. They do not suit our sober, practical habits of life and thought; and if we attempted them, we should only make ourselves ridiculous by our awkwardness. ”

“ Instead of lamenting the fascination of the story-wright, let us rather plead for its noble use, saying of him, as a great and generous brother writer said of Dickens: "What a place it is to hold in the affections of men! What an awful responsibility hanging over a writer! What man holding such a place, and knowing that his words go forth to vast congregations of mankind—to grown folks, to their children, and perhaps to their children's children—but must think of his calling with a solemn and humble heart! May love and truth guide such a man always!" ”

“ Keeping in view the short time we have possessed this land, we may fairly arrogate to ourselves what England has long claimed for herself, great "progress." We have created more great cities, more luxurious habits, more free whiskey, more useless railroads, more brokers' boards, more wild-cat banks, more swindling mining companies, more political jobs, more precocious boys and more fast girls, more bankrupt men and more nervous women than any country known in history. ”

“ Monarchy has been the rule of violence; inequality and centralization are of its essence. The rebellion in England and the French revolution were the long-delayed protests of outraged peoples against ruinous taxation and hurtful tyranny and cankerous corruption. When the disgraceful crimes by men in high places were exposed last year European journals made themselves merry over the corruptions which they alleged were the legitimate outgrowths of democratic institutions. In the first place, our Government is not a democracy, and never was intended to be. ”

“ It is not quite true that the history of a literature is the history of a people; still further from the truth is it that literary history which is not the history of a people is worthless. It might be easily shown that some of the very greatest literary productions known to the world have very slight relations, or none at all, to the condition of the society in which they were written. What, for example, is there in Shakespeare's plays, or in Sir Walter Scott's poems and novels, which is a manifestation of the spirit of their time? ”

“ So patient and indefatigable has Germany been, that at Manchester in England, which may perhaps be termed the Delos of the new faith, I was told some five years ago that she had just taken the contract, had bought from Germany the iron beams and rafters for a new city building, and had put them up under the very noses of the worshippers who burn their sacred fires at Birmingham and Wolverhampton. And so, in the whirligig of time, Trade brings his pleasant revenges. ”

“ In other countries liberty has been not so much a creation as a growth. In conservative England, suffrage has been slowly, temperately enlarged, always preserving restrictions so as not to commit the destinies of the kingdom to an ignorant mob. Giving the elective franchise to the suddenly emancipated negroes, placing the government of States in the hands of such a class, wholly unprepared by education or experience, if not such a repeating crime, would be a farce for the ages. Every person of the least intelligence knows that generally the voting of the negroes is a mere sham. ”

“ We had the excitements of the exhibition days, the pleasures of social life, and then we had also my dear little girl, our Nellie! Sometimes I fancy that such happiness cannot die; that if our words and actions perpetuate themselves, such vivid experiences cannot fade away, and that I may some time find it all passed into an eternal form! But these are dreams; for every thing has changed, and I know that nothing can be eternal that is not based upon truth, upon faithfulness. ”

“ The noble ambition ought rather to be to lift up the South and the United States to the level of its privileges, and in the future to harmonize the ideal and the actual. The South needs the development of her material resources, the diversification of industry, the construction of permanent highways, the power of machinery in its manifold applications, sounder notions of labor, rigid economy and responsibility in all offices. The whole country should encourage universal education in universities, colleges, academies, and public schools; elevate the tone of a free press ”

“ As an artist cannot work without colors and brushes, so a dramatist cannot work without actors. Good actors cannot permanently lift a bad play out of the mud, but bad actors can murder the best drama ever written, and even the best actor cannot make a hit if his part does not fit him and his physical appearance. ”

“ The actual Rome, the living man, the painting, the landscape which we travel far to see—these dispel at once the preconception; a glance, and the dream is gone, however long domesticated in the mind, however brightly glowing but now in the imagination. Fact is a careless bedfellow, and overlays the tender child Fancy; and even when nature contrives the change less rudely, we can hardly resign our poor, familiar fancies without regret. But sometimes, happily, we can do what Winckelmann did not do; we can retain the old fancies and compare them with the experience. ”

“ By popular vote, by elastic constructions or palpable violations of the Constitution, by unprecedented assumptions, our Federal system has been revolutionized. It is the height of absurdity to talk of the restrictions of a written Constitution, when a dominant majority interprets finally that instrument, and there are no remedies to protect against invasion or encroachment.8 It is a mere glittering generality to boast of a constitutional republic, if a President can violate the organic law with impunity, or if Congress is restrained in its assumptions only by its own sense of justice. ”

“ The young men led a riotous life; they rioted with the ocean, with the winds, with the level island, with the sunshine and the racing clouds. They sailed over to the reef daily and plunged into the surf; they walked for miles along the beach, and ran races over its white floor; they hunted down the centre of the island, and brought back the little brown deer who lived in the low thicket on each side of the island's backbone. ”

“ That men with no intelligent understanding of rights and duties, unable to read, untrained in political affairs, wholly ignorant of the commonest matters pertaining to government, superstitious, credulous, victims of impostors, paying no capitation tax, should decide upon grave questions of organic or statute law, upon the financial or foreign policy of the country, should control counties, cities, States, is an offence that will stink in the nostrils of coming centuries. ”

“ This something is stage experience. He may be an actor, no matter how bad, a scene painter, a carpenter, a musician, but he must have been about a theatre in some capacity, no matter how humble, to see how things work. One week behind the curtain is worth a year in front. The mere acquaintance with the ways of managers and actors is worth a good deal of time, but the familiarity with the working of a piece is the main thing. ”

“ Minola extracted beautiful pictures and much poetry and romance from that little bridge over the discolored canal, creeping through the heart of London.
The population of London—even its idlers—usually move along in tracks and grooves. Where some go, others go; where few go, at last none go. It is wonderful what hours of almost absolute solitude Minola was able to enjoy in the midst of Regent's Park. ”

“ The Sister shrank nearer to her companion as the figure had suddenly made itself visible. "Do you know it is a wonder to me how you have ever managed to live, so far?" said Keith smiling.
"But it was not far," said the little nun. "Nothing was ever far at the dear convent, but everything was near, and not of strangeness to make one afraid; the garden wall was the end. There we go not outside, but our walk is always from the lime tree to the white rosebush and back again. ”

“ How can a man of fifty, to whom, as regards face and figure, Nature has been stingy, play an amorous swain of twenty without taking refuge in a mannerism? His mannerism is a legitimate device for diverting the spectator's attention from certain incongruities. Delaunay's juvenility, his ardor, his passion, his good taste and sense of fitness, have always an irresistible charm. As he has grown older he has increased his repertory by parts of greater weight and sobriety—he has played the husbands as well as the lovers. ”

“ She has built magnificent temples dedicated to her great god all over England: at Birmingham and Manchester, at Glasgow and Paisley; at Birkenhead and Liverpool, at Preston and Salford, at Leeds and Nottingham—and where not? England has become a great workshop in which the god of trade is ministered to.
Her land? Yes, it is beautiful, but her yeoman have disappeared—all have been drawn into the maw of the manufacturing monster. Forty millions of people now has England, and only some seven per cent. of them raise the food they eat. And how do the rest get their food? ”

“ As, a queen of love and beauty, I lie in thine embrace,
Melting—melting—melting, as a woman only can
When she's a willing captive in the conquering arms of man,
As he towers a god above her, and to yield is not defeat,
For love can own no victor if love with love shall meet?
I still have regal splendor, I still have queenly power,
And—more than all—unfaded is woman's glorious dower. ”