Various

“ They are all entranced by the music. Plainly there is not a sound in the room but that which is produced by the fair performer. The souls of all that company are enchained; their hearts if not their eyes are brimming with emotion. A spell of tenderness and grace has been cast upon them; and they have given themselves up to him who has woven it. The faces of all are lightly tinged with sadness, but it is an elevated and elevating sadness; a sadness that is mingled with a joy silent, deep, and strong, a joy far above hilarity. ”

“ How I feel like swinging her in triumph before the faces of Mesdames Malise and her friends!—a simple, frank, good girl, who never in her life thought of crying out about a career, and a smoothing of her way, or declared her right to devote herself to art, and to such an unwomanly branch of it as the drawing of horses and soldiers, but set herself obscurely at work, and toiled as faithfully as if she hadn't a spark of genius in her—to win what she has already done, and yet will do! ”

“ Heron, I assure you. But whom then do you care about—in that sense?"
"I distrust a man who takes a woman's money in a reckless and selfish way," Heron said impetuously. "That is a man I would not trust. Don't trust him, Miss Grey; believe me, he is a cad—I mean a selfish and deceitful fellow. I can't bear the thought of a girl like you being sacrificed—or sacrificing yourself as you might do perhaps—and I tell you that he is just the sort of man——"
"Are you speaking of Mr. Blanchet now, Mr. Heron?" ”

“ Her own little sitting-room in the associate house is as heterogeneous as herself—the room lined with soft comforts, the air heavy with the fragrance of a profusion of flowers, the room's mistress nearly lost in the capaciousness of a most luxurious lounging chair, her table piled with ascetic literature; and in this chamber I encountered the other day the very oddest of all the peculiar people to whom my friendship for "little Malaise" has introduced me—a Miss Beauclerc, a short, stout, dark, coarse-skinned woman of fifty odd, hair cropped close, and an obstinate, honest, horse face. ”

“ That emotion came there with a strange, overwhelming force, like that of intoxication to a man always rigidly sober before. If Minola had had him crowned a king, she could hardly have done any greater thing for him. Few men on earth can ever have had their dearest ambition so sweetly gratified as it was the lot of Herbert, the poet, to find his ambition gratified now. To have his poems so set before the world would have been a glory and a rapture, no matter though the patron's hand had been that of a withered old man or some fat frump of a dowager ”

“ For years Lady —— had declaimed against the bondage, the hideous wrongs and wretchednesses of marriage, and had never tired in depicting a glorious earth-life in the future when the free man and woman should love each other because they loved—but be held to no duty of loving, no responsibility—free as the air to come and go; and young ——, fed on such food, companioned as he had always been, was far more vehement than his mother upon the subject, and had sworn by all his gods that civilized marriage should never count him among its victims. ”

“ All of Schumann's music that I ever heard, from symphony down to piano-forte music, is not worth Beethoven's Sonata in C sharp minor, or Mozart's quartet in C.7 They have a certain sort of beauty and charm while you are hearing them, but you don't hanker after them; passages from them don't come to you when you are alone with troubled thoughts, and comfort you, hearten you, and build you up, as the remembered strains of Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven do. Simply, they are without real melody: they have only a well manufactured imitation of melody. ”

“ There is something really exasperating in the sight of a picturesque poet wantonly slighting an opportunity to go to Spain—the Spain of forty years ago. It does violence even to that minimum of intellectual eagerness which is the portion of a contemplative mind. It is annoying to think that Alfred de Musset should have been meagrely contemplative. This is the weakness that tells against him, more than the weakness of what would be called his excesses. From the point of view of his own peculiar genius, it was a good fortune for him to be susceptible and tender, sensitive and passionate. ”

“ There was an artistic and literary association to which Blanchet belonged, and amid which he passed most of his nights. It was not exactly a club, for it had neither definite rules nor even a distinct habitation. It was a little sect rather than a club. It was an association of men who believed each in himself, and all, at least for the present, in each other. Their essential condition of existence was scorn of the world's ways, politics, and theories of art. They held that man himself was a poor creature, unworthy of the artist's serious consideration. ”

“ Writing, like Shakespeare, always for money, and not hesitating to put his hand to any task that would bring him a return, driven by sharp necessity almost to the prostitution of his genius, driven in his boyhood, by an exacting father, to write as an infant prodigy for the support of the family, dying at the early, and, as far as the mind is concerned, the immature, age of thirty-seven, he left behind him, in the mass of his compositions, much that was hastily produced merely to meet the needs of the moment. ”

“ If Victor had known the world better, he would have known that much, very much, of all this was but the mere affectation and nonsense of youth. These young men were as yet among the "odious race of the unappreciated." Yet a little, and some of them will make a success, and will have the credit of the world for what they do, and they will turn out good fellows, kindly, true, and even modest. Nothing makes some young men so insufferably conceited and aggressive as the idea that they are not successful, and that people know it. There are many of us mortals with whom prosperity only agrees. ”

“ Herbert might marry Mimi at any moment; no one could ask of the Fates a more lovable wife and daughter-in-law; but it was nonsense—worse, it was wickedness—to dream of living after or up to their convictions in society as now constituted. Did Herbert think for a moment what would befall Mimi if she acted as her generosity and all their ideas would prompt her? It would be destruction—simple destruction to the child, and if her son could not sacrifice his principles to his love, then he was bound in honor and pity, living in this unhappy time, to sacrifice his heart. ”

“ With the broad superstructure of a body of voting policy-holders, the selling out of the control of a company is impossible, because no one will be willing to pay for the possession which the next election may deprive him of. Of all the mean and contemptible methods of robbery as yet discovered, the selling out of a life insurance company is the meanest and most contemptible. Too cowardly to wreck it themselves and personally rob the widows and orphans, the trustees, who quietly receive a bonus for their stock and retire from the management, sell the opportunity of robbery to others. ”

“ If the presumption is against the dignity of deeply poetic utterance, poor Musset is, in the vulgar phrase, nowhere—he is a mere grotesque sound of lamentation. But if in judging him you don't stint your sympathy, you will presently perceive him to have an extraordinarily precious quality—a quality equally rare in literature and in life. He has passion. There is in most poetry a great deal of reflection, of wisdom, of grace, of art, of genius ”

“ As for Cotterell, he hasn't a money anxiety in the world, and is reckoned one of the most brilliant leader writers in London; but his wife is the most commonplace woman alive—no more a companion to him than a housemaid would be; and Cotterell's not one of the clever men who like women to be pillows, and pillows only. He has given up society, save that of men, almost entirely; lives in his study and his room in the 'Phare' building, and his talk, when one meets him, is a mixture of fatalism and wormwood, depressing to the last degree. ”

“ The composition is so touching, so filled with purest, sweetest sentiment, that it is impossible to look at it long without being moved almost to tears by the tender and serene pathos with which it is pervaded. The legend tells us that the music which has wrought this spell is "A Melody by Mozart."
In the second compartment of the triptique, which is labelled "Drawing-room Music of the Present," a young lady also sits at a piano-forte. It is a grand, a very grand piano-forte; a tremendous institution, the invisible end of which stretches far into infinitude. ”

“ It is wrong to be carrying about the dead corpse of the past. A new generation has grown up since 1860. The spirit of the age is not what it was two decades since. The young men know next to nothing of Whiggery and Democracy. To make secession, or slavery, or the "bloody shirt" a rallying cry, is as absurd as to exhume the embargo or the alien and sedition laws. The inertia of society is great, and men cohere from traditions of the past. ”

“ What to my lodgings at the tailor's—a poor cobbler-tailor, in Dresden? What to my lunches of Wurst beer and black bread? What to the concerts, where, in smoke and a three-penny seat, I heard music as good as plenty which costs me ten shillings to a guinea in London? What to all the cheek-by-jowl encounters with the peasants in our cheap, rapturously happy sketching tours? Bah! the poor Irishman! ”

“ Charity can be unjust: it is unjust in its pity. Pity, indeed, is its essence." Were this a true definition of charity, Mr. Frothingham might be justified in the tone he takes toward it. But the very spirit of charity is at war not only with injustice, but with arrogance, and with phariseeism of all kinds. Its very essence is the assumption of good motives, even on the part of those who differ radically from us in conduct and belief. ”

“ I need hardly say to any musician that I am not speaking of technical form, either of harmonic progression or of the cast of a composition, as for example the sonata form, the symphonic form, the dramatic form, but of the form of intrinsic absolute value which appeals to the general craving for and appreciation of beauty. This beauty of form cannot be disregarded in any art without failure to attain the highest place in the world's estimation, no matter how marvellous and admirable the powers displayed in another direction. ”

“ She opened her purse to put it back, but it fell from her hand, scattering her little stock of money over the floor, and a moment after, when Mrs. Sharpe came in, in response to frantic halloos from Scotty, she found Marian in a dead faint upon the floor, with Scotty and Circus Jack, with hands clasped behind them, kneeling on either side of her like uncouth angels, while scattered coins and escaping masses of golden-brown hair formed a halo about her head. ”

“ The great drawing-room is filled with a crowd of people who have evidently been bidden to listen to the music. But they are undergoing it with stolid indifference as they talk or try to talk, either almost shouting or whispering into each other's deafened ears and bewildered brains. ”

“ Nor, making every needful allowance for the friendship between Miss Grey and his sister, did he find in that a sufficing explanation of Minola's liberality. He set himself to think over the whole matter coolly and impartially, and he could come to no other conclusion than that Miss Grey admired him. He was a handsome fellow, as he knew very well, and tall, and romantic in appearance: what could be more natural than that a poetic young woman should fall in love with him? ”

“ As essential to reduction of Executive patronage, and disarming the President of the dangerous influence and power growing out of it, there should be a persevering and a large reduction of federal expenditures. General Jackson, in 1836, truly said, "No political maxim is better established than that which tells us that an improvident expenditure of the public money is the parent of profligacy, and that no people can hope to perpetuate their liberties who long acquiesce in a policy which taxes them for objects not necessary to the legitimate and real wants of their government." ”

“ And then it all came out—the fact that the child was killed while his nurse was trying to wheel him across the road in Westbourne Grove—but Ronayne wouldn't have any details told me.
The poor little man! My own baby's age, and such a sweet-tempered, patient little fellow! What a life! To come where he had but grudging welcome, to have no real mother, no warm little places of fond sunshine, and to go away from all this world's possibilities in that sudden cruelty! ”

“ He began to look on the poet now as a mere fortune-hunter, who was fastening upon the girl because of the money which he expected her to have. He did not know how consuming a passion is the vanity of the small artistic mind—the mind which has art's ambition only and not art's inspiration. Mr. Blanchet was not a fortune-hunter in the ordinary sense. His poems were to him as yet much dearer than any fortune. He was drawn to Minola not because she had money, but because having money she was willing to spend some of it in bringing out his poems in a handsome edition. ”

“ They have sounded the depths of versification, and beside their refined, consummate facture Musset's simple devices and good-natured prosody seem to belong to a primitive stage of art. It is the difference between a clever performer on the tight rope and a gentleman strolling along on soft turf with his hands in his pockets. If people care supremely for form, Musset will always but half satisfy them. ”

“ There was one consolation—the dedication did not set forth her name, and nobody could know who the lady patroness of the poet might be. Minola felt inclined to be offended that she should be in any way brought into this folly, but she was not certain whether remonstrance or complaint might not be more ridiculous than utter silence. After all nobody knew anything about her or cared, she said. If she were to complain in any way, it would only grieve poor Mary, whom the thought that her brother could have offended her friend and leader would drive well-nigh distracted. ”