Various

“ Perched on his seat, Rounders's eyes dwelt on the landscape with its purple tints of the morning, and his nostrils sniffed the sweet odors of Nature while she was still in déshabille. Silently, like a variegated serpent, the caravan crept around the hills and through the valleys. The musicians, clad in gold and scarlet, rode through the country in their magnificent chariot, and gave out no sound, their breath being reserved for the towns and villages. The vestal silence remained unbroken by the stridulous clarinet and the blatant trombones.
Every man has a weakness, and Brinton had his. ”

“ His hotel in the Rue de Varenne was the resort of all that was most remarkable and extraordinary in the fashionable, the artistic, the diplomatic, and the scientific world. His intimacy with the Abbé Gérard was one of long standing: they mutually amused each other; the keen intellect of the priest found much that was interesting in the shallow but attractive and brilliant nature of the layman; while the Duke entertained feelings of the warmest admiration for a man who, having risen from nothing, enlivened the most exclusive coteries with his graceful learning and charming wit. ”

“ As the gravediggers were brought into "Hamlet" for the sake of the groundlings, so Thersites came into "Troilus and Cressida." As if that he might leave no form of human utterance ungilded by his genius, Shakespeare in Thersites has given us the apotheosis of blackguardism and billingsgate. Thersites is only a railing rascal. Some low creatures are mere bellies with no brain. Thersites is merely mouth, but this mouth has just enough coarse brain above it to know a wise man and a fool when he sees them. ”

“ The man swore savagely, but the cold thread of insulated wire over his throat thrilled his every nerve. It seemed some magic bond, mysterious, wonderful, and dreadful. This cool man of science was an angel of awful and incomprehensible power. His lamp of such mystic brilliance and that battery quite unnerved his coward heart. What awful torture, what burning flash of lightning might not rend him to blackened fragments if the wires were broken! To such depths of puerile ignorance and terror did the wretch sink in his guilty fancy. He dared not move a muscle lest the wire break. ”

“ Oh, Miss Grey—I love you. May I hope that I may look forward to the happiness of one day making you my wife?"
It was all out now, and she was glad. The rest would be easy. He looked even then so prosaic and formal that she did not believe in any of his professed emotions, and she was therefore herself unmoved.
"No, Mr. Sheppard," she said, looking calmly at him straight in the face. "Such a day will never come. Nothing that I have seen in life makes me particularly anxious to be married; and I could not marry you." ”

“ Three days ago I married the only woman I have loved, whom I loved more than ever, and whom I shall love until death. I believe that this union is the recompense that God has held in reserve for me through so many adversities, years of work, difficulties suffered and surmounted. I had neither a happy youth nor a flowering spring; I shall have the most brilliant summer, the sweetest of all autumns." It had been, as Balzac says, a drama of the heart, and the dénouement was of the heart alone. ”

“ Some thought like this was passing through the mind of Miss Minola Grey, who sat on the steps of the tomb and looked up into the faces illustrative of man's struggle and final success. Life had long been wearing a hard and difficult appearance to her, and she would perhaps have been glad enough sometimes if she could have got into the haven of quiet waters which, in the minds of so many people and in so many symbolic representations, is made to stand for Eternity. ”

“ As he spoke Pomerantseff seized the Abbé's hand. "You heard me tell the Duke just now that I believed he had seen the spirit of love. Well, the sermon you preached the day before yesterday, which all Paris is talking about, and in which you endeavored to prove the personality of the devil to be a fact, was truer than perhaps you believed when you preached it. Why should not Frontignan have seen the spirit of love when I know and have seen the devil?"
"Mon ami, you are insane!" cried Gérard. "Why, the devil does not exist!" ”

“ But if it be granted, or even proved, that this is true, we cannot see how it satisfies the reason when we come to the question of creation and a creator. For what a stupendous, unutterably stupendous, and almost inconceivable thing was that fire-mist that filled all space and had in it not only the germs and possibilities of suns and moons and planets and our earth, but of man and all his civilization; and those laws and methods and forces according to which the universe and man and his civilization have been evolved from a fire-mist—what inconceivable things they are! ”

“ But in Ulysses, Shakespeare, acting upon a mere hint, filling up a mere traditionary outline, drew a man of mature years, of wide observation, of profoundest cogitative power, one who knew all the weakness and all the wiles of human nature, and who yet remained with blood unbittered and soul unsoured—a man who saw through all shams and fathomed all motives, and who yet was not scornful of his kind, not misanthropic, hardly cynical except in passing moods ”

“ And not a man, for being simply man,
Hath any honor.
Besides passages like these, there are others of which the wisdom is inextricably interwoven with the occasion. One would think that the wealth of such a mine would be daily passing from mouth to mouth as the current coin of speech; and yet of all Shakespeare's acknowledged plays, there are only two, "The Comedy of Errors" and "The Winter's Tale," which do not furnish more to our store of familiar quotations than this play does, rich though it is with Shakespeare's ripest thought and most splendid utterance. ”

“ What need of the garments of an actor if one no longer plays a part? An old man is a man who has dined, and who watches others eat; and I, young as I am—my plate is empty, and I am hungry. Laure, Laure, my two only and immense desires, to be famous and to be loved—will they ever be satisfied?"
These occasional bursts of confidence in his early letters to his sister are (with the exception of certain excellent pages, addressed in the last years of his life to the lady he eventually married) Balzac's most delicate, most emotional utterances. There is a touch of the ideal in them. ”

“ If we would know what Shakespeare thought of men and their motives after he reached maturity, we have but to read this drama; drama it is, but with what other character who shall say? For, like the world's pageant, it is neither tragedy nor comedy, but a tragi-comic history, in which the intrigues of amorous men and light-o'-loves and the brokerage of panders are mingled with the deliberations of sages and the strife and the death of heroes.
The thoughtful reader will observe that Ulysses pervades the serious parts of the play, which is all Ulyssean in its thought and language. ”

“ Sheppard likes what he considers a respectable connection in Keeton. Failing in one chance he will find another, and there is an end of that."
"I don't think so," Miss Blanchet said gravely. "Well, we shall see."
"We shall not see him any more. We shall live a glorious, lonely, independent life. I shall study humanity from some lofty garret window among the stars. London shall be my bark and my bride, as the old songs about the Rovers used to say. All the weaknesses of humanity shall reveal themselves to me in the people next door to us and over the way. ”

“ The true religionist will sooner accept one of these as a religion than a religion of evolution, or than he will consent to accept Christianity as a science of anything—of manhood, or even of God-hood.
—It is with this view of religion, this feeling about it, that the evolutionists have to deal when they endeavor to free themselves from the charge of irreligion. This is a state of the case which some of them do not seem to appreciate at its full importance. They shirk it, or at least they slight it; but Mr. Savage, it must be admitted, meets it fairly and boldly. ”

“ But the letters constantly show us a man with the edge of his spontaneity gone—a man groaning and sighing, as from Promethean lungs, complaining of his tasks, denouncing his enemies, and in complete ill humor generally with life. Of any expression of enjoyment of the world, of the beauties of nature, art, literature, history, human character, these pages are singularly destitute. And yet we know that such enjoyment—instinctive, unreasoning, essential—is half the inspiration of the poet. The truth is that Balzac was as little as possible of a poet ”

“ The Prince shrugged his shoulders.
"Prince, leave him alone," said the Abbé smiling. "His theory is a great deal more sensible than yours; and if I could bring myself to believe that at your séances any real phenomenon does take place (which of course no sane person can) , I should be much more apt to accept Frontignan's interpretation of the matter. Let us follow it out a little further, for the mere sake of talking nonsense. Doubtless the dominant passion of a man would be the most likely to appear—that is to say, would be the most tangible." ”

“ From first to last, every phenomenon and every law is linked immediately to some act or some command of God. It is God who creates, God who commands, God who names, God who approves, and God who blesses. Strike out the allusions to God, and the narrative is meaningless. Clearly it was never intended to teach science. It has obviously one purpose, to reveal and keep before the minds of men the grand truth that Jehovah is the sole Creator and Lord of the heavens and the earth; and it leaves the scientific comprehension of nature to the natural powers with which God has endowed man for that end. ”

“ Hence we have the god of evolution and the religion of evolution.
—But what is this god of evolution? In a very remarkable series of papers which have appeared for some months past in "Macmillan's Magazine," upon Natural Religion, remarkable equally for the subtlety and closeness of their thought and their clearness of style, something called Nature is set up as God; Mr. Savage's god, as nearly as we can make out, is the law of evolution—the formative power by which the universe passed from a mass of fluid fire, revolving in space, into suns, and suns and planets, and their inhabitants. ”

“ The first part of the lion performance passed off, and the second was at hand. The sweat stood on the forehead of Rounders in drops as it had on that of Brinton when Rounders saw him on the night of his irresolution. He issued from the little tent-chamber, with a piece of meat in each hand, as he had seen Brinton do. Miss Stubbs stood at the door of the cage in her professional costume, with the magic wand in her hand.
"Jim Rounders," said she solemnly, "keep cool. If you lose your presence of mind, you're gone." ”

“ My work alone sustains me in life. Is there then to be no woman for me in this world? My physical melancholy and ennui last longer and grow more frequent. To fall from this crushing labor to nothing—not to have near me that soft, caressing mind of woman, for whom I have done so much!" He had, however, a devoted feminine friend, to whom none of the letters in these volumes are addressed, but who is several times alluded to. This lady, Mme. de Berny, died in 1836, and Balzac speaks of her ever afterward with extraordinary tenderness and veneration. ”

“ Those Englishmen who reside in the treaty ports are not impartial judges of the concessions. Too often they go to Canton or Shanghai in a frame of mind that would exasperate a much less vain people than the Chinese. They sometimes talk as if they thought it a mere impertinence on the part of an inferior race to have a pride of its own, and they act as if the chief end of the Chinese were to minister to the demands of British trade. ”

“ Take good care of our mother, Laure, for the present and the future.... Some day, when my works are unfolded, you will see that it must have taken many hours to think and write so many things; and then you will absolve me of everything that has displeased you, and you will excuse, not the selfishness of the man (the man has none) , but the selfishness of the worker.
Nothing can be more touching than that; Balzac's natural affections were as robust as his genius and his physical nature. ”

“ He reproaches himself with having taken a shabby advantage of a person who is unable to defend himself. He feels as one who has broken open a cabinet or rummaged an old desk. The contents of Balzac's letters are so private, so personal, so exclusively his own affairs and those of no one else, that the generous critic constantly lays them down with a sort of dismay, and asks himself in virtue of what peculiar privilege, or what newly discovered principle it is, that he is thus burying his nose in them. ”

“ Perpetual work, when it is joyous and salubrious, is a very fine thing; but perpetual work, when it is executed with the temper which more than half the time appears to have been Balzac's, has in it something almost debasing. We constantly feel that his work would have been vastly better if the Muse of "business" had been elbowed away by her larger-browed sister. Balzac himself, doubtless, often felt in the same way; but, on the whole, "business" was what he most cared for. The "Comédie Humaine" represents an immense amount of joy, of spontaneity, of irrepressible artistic life. ”