Various

“ From its crest of chrysoprase and silver, indeed, to its broad foot of milky foam and of its white-stunned waves, too broken and too dazed to begin at first to float away, Niagara appears not terrible, but divinely and deliciously graceful, glad and lovely—a specimen of the splendor of water at its finest—a sight to dwell and linger in the mind with ineffaceable images of happy and grateful thought, by no means to affect it in seeing or to haunt it in future days of memory with any wild reminiscences of terror or of gloom. ”

“ Few augured the possibility that the encounter could terminate well for the Disinherited Knight, yet his courage and gallantry secured the general good wishes of the spectators.
The trumpets had no sooner given the signal than the champions vanished from their posts with the speed of lightning, and closed in the center of the lists with the shock of a thunderbolt. The lances burst into shivers up to the very grasp, and it seemed at the moment that both knights had fallen, for the shock had made each horse recoil backward upon its haunches. ”

“ You might hear the shrieks of women, the screams of children, and the shouts of men; some calling for their children, others for their parents, others for their husbands, and seeking to recognize each other by the voices that replied; one lamenting his own fate, another that of his family; some wishing to die, from the very fear of dying; some lifting their hands to the gods, but the greater part convinced that there were now no gods at all, and that the final endless night of which we have heard had come upon the world. ”

“ If he die he shall surely live again. Planted in the friendly but somber bosom of mother earth, it dies. Yea, it dies the second death, surrendering up each trace of form and earthly shape until the outward tide is stopped by the reacting vital germs which, breaking all the bonds and cerements of its sad decline, come bounding, laughing into life and light, the fittest of all the symbols that make certain promise of the fate of man. ”

“ A woman full of faith in the one she loves is but a novelist's fancy.
The mistakes of a woman result almost always from her faith in the good and her confidence in the truth.
Woman is a charming creature, who changes her heart as easily as her gloves.
The man who can govern a woman can govern a nation.
In the elevated order of ideas, the life of man is glory; the life of woman is love.
Marriage has its unknown great men as war has its Napoleons and philosophy its Descartes. ”

“ In our day and generation let us seek to raise and improve the moral sentiment, so that we may look, not for a degraded, but for an elevated and improved future. And when both we and our children shall have been consigned to the house appointed for all living, may love of country—and pride of country—glow with equal fervor among those to whom our names and our blood shall have descended! ”

“ The proposition is as absurd as it would be to say that the member of a law firm who pleads in the courts is a mere tender, a mere appendage, a mere beneficiary of the gentleman who sits in the office, sees the clients, and collects the bills, or that the expert engineer at the head of a steel plant is a mere tender to the man who manages the finances of the concern.
Nobody earns his or her livelihood more honorably or more directly than the wife and mother of a family who does her duty. ”

“ Your letter rises before me as I write like a tablet of white stone bearing a dead name. I see you standing beside me. I look into your eyes and press your hand and say nothing.
Hearn was ever an artist, and he ever knew what art meant. In advising his friend to break away from the exhausting routine of daily journalism, he gave a typical expression of his philosophy of life:
Under the levity of Henri Mürger's picturesque Bohemianism there is a serious philosophy apparent which elevates the characters of his romance to heroism. ”

“ When a man is in the full flower of health and intellectual activity, his utterances, either guarded or careless, usually are more or less tinctured by his social environments—environments that are rather more artificial than natural. But when the shadow of death falls upon him, and earthly vanities crowd out of the chamber that is marked as the vestibule of his tomb, the language he speaks is that of the man himself—one who realizes that he is nearer eternal truth than human pretense. ”

“ Every imaginable experiment upon what would and what would not support life must have been tried thousands of years ago, and yet our most striking proofs of how highly men value their "precious right of private haziness," as George Eliot shrewdly terms it, are to be found in the realm of dietetics. The "light that never was on sea or land" still survives for the most matter-of-fact of us in the memory of "the pies that mother used to make," and nowhere else do we find preferences so widely accepted as evidence, and prejudices as matters of fact, as in this arena. ”

“ Sir, I might stand here for hours and hours and expatiate with rapture upon the gorgeous prospects of Duluth as depicted upon this map. But human life is far too short and the time of this House far too valuable to allow me to linger longer upon the delightful theme. Nevertheless, sir, it grieves my very soul to be compelled to say that I cannot vote for the grant of lands provided for in this bill. ”

“ American Men Marry for Love.
The American is insulted if mention of dowry is made in his wedding arrangements. He marries because he loves the woman and she him. Hence, the American people have become exceedingly beautiful. Then the facilities for divorce presented in the United States are an important factor in the beautification process. Love is really at the bottom of it all—not money-bags or race, but love. ”

“ Let us hold fast the great truth that communities are responsible as well as individuals; that no government is respectable which is not just; that without unspotted purity of public faith, without sacred public principle, fidelity, and honor—no mere forms of government, no machinery of laws, can give dignity to political society. ”

“ Every great nation of the world will inevitably be drawn into more or less intimate relations with this gigantic development. It is for them to determine, each for itself, what these relations shall be—whether those of amity and friendship and kindness or those of brute force and the mailed fist. ”

“ Having rested for the remainder of that day, they again began to cross the level country, and continued doing so for many days, without having seen a single human being since their departure from the farm, when, one day, in a glade of the woods, they saw a band of Indians among the trees, who, having approached, spoke in a pleasant but to them unknown language. Their gestures betokened their surprise at beholding people so different in color to themselves, and armed with what appeared to them only polished sticks. ”

“ The honeymooner who finds it less difficult to make money than to kill time shapes his matrimonial course via Pittsburgh or Paris. The good, patriotic, homespun sort of chap, who finds it more easy to kill time than to make money, and who may one day be the father of a President of the United States, whirls his bride off to Washington or Niagara. Washington is a little dull and rather warm after Congress adjourns, so the June bride is most likely to pick the last of the rice-grains out of her hair within earshot of the great Northern cataract. ”

“ Now, to diminish the friction of this trying time no better lubricant could possibly be provided than the romantic love, which cannot be expected to last forever, but which may very probably outlast this greatest necessity for it of the early connubial period.
When the glamour of the romance "fades into the light of common day," and a real man and a real woman take the places of the creatures of each other's fancy, and passion cools into at best the tenderest of friendships, both parties are better off, and will acknowledge themselves to be better off because the romance has been. ”

“ A French artist has drawn, with true French taste, the Lord's Supper, with the table ornamented with tumblers filled with cigar-lighters; and, as if to crown the list of these absurd and ludicrous anachronisms, the Garden of Eden has been drawn with Adam and Eve in all their primeval simplicity and virtue, while near them, in full costume, is seen a hunter with a gun, shooting ducks. ”

“ She is her husband's business partner in a phase of his life which is at least as vital to his interests as the outside one by which he makes his money under the eye of the world. If the couple are partners in a poor and struggling concern, the wife contributes as much to the general success by the work of her hands as the man does by his; if they are more fortunate, and prosperous, the woman's busy brain contriving and ruling in the household is earning by earnest, eager, expert, and honorable exertion as good a livelihood as the husband is able to provide her with. ”

“ The only time Woody ever saw a man killed by a bear was once when he had given a touch of variety to his life by shipping on a New Bedford whaler which had touched at one of the Puget Sound ports. The whaler went up to a part of Alaska where bears were very plentiful and bold. One day a couple of boats' crews landed; and the men, who were armed only with an occasional harpoon or lance, scattered over the beach, one of them, a Frenchman, wading into the water after shell-fish. Suddenly a bear emerged from some bushes and charged among the astonished sailors, who scattered in every direction ”

“ Springing back with terror from the edge of the precipice over which they had so nearly plunged, they eyed the thundering and foaming torrent with amazement, not noticing that part of the rock on which they had just been standing was tottering, and slowly separating itself from the adjoining mass, till they were roused by the crash with which it was precipitated into the gulf below, shaking the living rock from whence it had been detached, and resounding through the woods, far above the roaring of the stupendous cataract. ”

“ The Senate of the United States—is it a treasonable body? A body that holds a man like Murray Crane, of Massachusetts? Because some men are there who ought not to be there—some who bought the position—shall we say that the governors of our body politic are guilty of treason? Base men are there, but when in the bright, breezy sentiments of modern newspaper life you assert there is treason, you either lie or misconceive the meaning of the English language.
On the other side, Norman Hapgood says, in Collier's:
Who is doing most to make railroad and beef trust facts and problems understood? ”

“ During all this time my mother and I, who were at Misenum—but this has no connection with your history, and you did not desire any particulars besides those of my uncle's death, so I will end here, only adding that I have faithfully related to you what I was either a witness of myself or received the news of immediately after the accident happened, and before there was time to vary the truth.
You will pick out of this narrative whatever is most important, for a letter is one thing, a history another; it is one thing writing to a friend, another writing to the public. ”

“ A loud shout from the spectators, waving of scarfs and handkerchiefs, and general acclamations attested the interest taken by the spectators in this encounter; the most equal, as well as the best performed, which had graced the day. But no sooner had the knights resumed their station than the clamor of applause was hushed into a silence so deep and so dead that it seemed the multitude were afraid even to breathe. ”

“ The scudding clouds conceal the half and then reveal the whole of the moonlit beauty of the night; and then the gentle winds make heavenly harmonies on a thousand thousand harps that hang upon the borders, and the edges, and the middle of the field of ripening corn, until my very heart seems to beat responsive with the rising and the falling of the long, melodious refrain. The melancholy clouds sometimes make shadows on the field and hide its aureate wealth ”

“ If Canada can at any time help the United States in any direction which will improve the conditions of life for your people, she will consider it a blessed privilege to be allowed to render that assistance; and I feel sure that the people of the United States will also be only too glad to assist us in our struggle toward the realization of high ideals and toward the attainment of a national character distinguished by the fulness with which the principles of fair play, freedom, and duty shall be applied by the people of Canada to the various occupations of their lives. ”

“ Thou greatest among the manifestations of the wisdom and the love of God that may be seen in all the fields, or upon the hillsides, or in the valleys. Glorious corn that, more than all the sisters of the field, wears tropic garments. Nor on the shore of Nilus nor of Ind does Nature dress her forms more splendidly. ”