Various

“ I come, then, gentlemen, to say to France, I have preferred a woman whom I love and respect to an unknown person, the advantages of an alliance with whom would be mingled with sacrifices. In placing independence, the qualities of the heart, family happiness above dynastic prejudices, I shall not be less strong, because I shall be more free. Very soon, in betaking myself to Nôtre Dame, I shall present the Empress to the people and the army ”

“ Why fill the hands of the dead with flowers which you have withheld from the living? Who would [651] not rather have one smile, one tender word to-day, than to know that a million roses would be heaped upon his coffin? Who would not rather live and dream among the flowers of love than to sleep the dreamless sleep beneath a wilderness of flowers?
Then why not let the Gulf Stream of love flow on? For its warm current breathes upon the icy shores of mortal life and makes them blossom with laughter and song. Love is the soul of the beautiful, the true and the good; it is all there is of happiness. ”

“ Who is there that has not in the morning of life read with delight of the martial prowess and religious fervor of Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid of Orleans? Her love of her church, and her love for her country, ought to be remembered by men who are now playing fast and loose with the fortunes of both. Who but will admit that their Excellencies, Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, with their imperious sway, did more to extend the glory of France than either of the great Louises under whom they ministered? ”

“ Die not in all the years that shall elapse before I shall burn new kisses upon new lips—kisses long feigned and passion-wrapt, nor let your spirit of love grow dim, nor your spirit of power abate! Come ye, as in time past, ye have come—sweeping away the clouds that gather over the head of earth’s lonely pilgrim, stilling the breakers that form in madness on life’s reefs, hushing the storms that roar and howl and threaten in the darkness! ”

“ But let the loom of love for a moment stop; let its blissful shuttle cease to fly, and that moment happiness will lie dead on the hearthstone, and laughter will perish among the roses at the door.
All men are Kings, but love is King of Kings. His imperial chariot rumbles over the cobblestones of human hearts, and the sighing millions are his worshipers. Wealth bows its haughty head before his throne, and pays penance with jewels and gold; labor bends the reverent knee and counts its beads of sweat ”

“ So it is with human life. It hath its spirit looms, and its throbbing shuttles forever delivering to the warp and woof of hope and memory, the shining threads of human kindness, and weaving them into gossamer webs of love around our hearts and in our homes. Every tender word we speak; every blessing we bestow is a thread of sunshine woven into somebody’s life; and all the smiles and sympathies which come to us from other hearts are threads of light and love woven into our own. ”

“ Great God, it hurts me to think of North Carolina, the birthplace of my father and all his fathers before him that I know anything of, the birthplace of Polk and Shelby and Robertson and a host of others as great sons as ever God gave to the republic, the land of the Anglo-Celt, of patriotism and tar-heel gameness—it hurts me, I repeat, to learn that she stands at the foot, and Tennessee, her daughter and her equal in past grandeur, patriotism and principles, stands next! ”

“ And when the baby cries in the dead hours of the night, dost thou meekly wear thy yoke of love and walk the floor and sweetly sing to thy screaming progeny?
Alas! too often thou art found where sherry glows and champagne flows and the night is very, very merry, O King!
I saw a truant old gentleman vanish from his labors to a carousal one evening, and that night he went home as drunk as a lord, with unsteady steps and slow, dreading the storm within, and softly singing to himself as he went:
“I wish my wife was an angel, far, far away!” ”

“ The hot blood surged in my cheek as I thought of the 60,000 little white children of the South and the 2,000,000 in the cotton mills and factories and mines and sweatshops of the nation, robbed of their rights of childhood [656] by the greed of gold, the graft of politicians and the low ignorance and lazy debasement of their own parents, stealing from them not only the rights of an education, but even the right of life! ”

“ It was his inherent, unswerving love of human liberty, his tense loyalty and stern faith in the institutions of his country, his immaculate conception of right and duty, and the superb fearlessness that possessed him, that made the man convincing.
It is said that Jackson has more biographers than any other national character. His career was so replete with incidents inviting interpretation that writers are drawn to it like flies about the sugar-bowl. Of no other man can historians resort to panegyric in substitute of statement and be justified by public criticism. ”

“ A bright morning, I dare predict, will at a not distant time dawn over the field of battle, dropping from the skies sunshine and peace and begetting both in the Church and in France, joy and exultation that the passage-at-arms, angry as it once was, has opened the way to a clearer understanding of mutual interests, to a warmer glow of olden mutual love. ”

“ So I sent word to Myers to lead out for the Owl Creek bridge next to Sherman’s camp.
“I asked myself, to be sure, if we are beating the enemy, and he is on the run, why the want of me? And why the order to form my line at right angles with the river? I could not answer, but rested implicitly on the order. Grant was on the ground—he knew—that was enough. The idea of defeat never entered my mind; and starting, as I was, with intelligence of a victory already won by our army, what ground is there for the imputation that I had the achievement of some special glory in purpose? ”

“ My friends, a man who would steal from a child his childhood, that which makes all his after life worth living, who would filch from it its body, brain and soul, is a human torpedo—a torpedo of hell. And, in the language of Farragut, I say unto you: “Damn them and go ahead!”
There was Forrest, another fighting Tennessean and a poor little white trash, one with fifteen brothers and sisters—just the ideal family made for the maw of a cotton mill—for upon such families do they declare their dividends. ”

“ Our ideas of social life and social equality could not have been conceived under the influence of European institutions. Here, where those in the humblest walks of life may be the nobility, and where honor is conferred for merit alone, we have developed social customs to correspond with our American spirit, and, proceeding on independent and original lines, we have made our industrial and commercial system to control the busiest marts, to break the records of history, to fairly alarm the world. ”

“ Juliette smiled and flushed indignantly. “A wild General from Tennessee! Mother,” she said to the older lady, “listen! Is there not a surprise in store for her?”
The Livingston mansion, the most fashionable home in the city, had been lighted with many candles when Juliette arrived. From its wide-pillared portico a negro butler ushered her in where a hum of feminine voices greeted her and a beautiful sight met her eyes. Besides herself, a dozen of the most beautiful society women of New Orleans had been asked to help receive the noted Indian fighter. ”

“ You may be ignorant, but God knows you will fight! Then fight for the white children of your state—fight these laws and the politicians who made them with strings to them—made them to be evaded. Fight for more and better schools and the abolition of child labor until your state stands in the column where its pedigree and its past record entitles it to stand! ”

“ The most noted character in American history, one whom the coming ages will number among the truly great, was born at a point so obscure that its exact location is still in dispute. On the remote frontier of the Carolina colony, whose boundary lines were uncertain; far up on the forest-clad banks of the Catawba, whose slopes were just beginning to feel the pioneer’s axe; on the fifteenth day of March, 1767, Andrew Jackson was presented to humanity. ”

“ You know, and I know, and all within the sound of my voice know, what are the rights of childhood—the right to an education, to health, to play, to work in proportion to its age and strength, to a fair chance and a square deal in this greatest country of the world’s greatest age. ”

“ The most conspicuous service rendered to mankind by Andrew Jackson was the creation and enforcement of the political cult that is expressed in his name. “Andy Jackson Democracy” has no mere partisan significance, but it denotes a principle and power in popular government that is to save to America forever the right of the people to rule themselves—the invincible strength of a central government based upon the supreme power of the separate states acting in harmony. ”

“ Right here Montgomery Bell had a tunnel blasted through the bluff, and by means of a wing dam drew the waters of the Upper Harpeth through this opening in a mighty, resistless current that afforded unlimited water power for the operations of a blast furnace. And there it is to-day, singing its stormy requiem to the memory of a man and age that have passed into the shade, but yet inviting in its prodigal waste and riotous power the hand of capital and enterprise to harness it anew.
In timber, soil, minerals and climate Dickson County is well dowered. ”

“ For if it is God and immortality, there would be no fears, doubts, pitiless days [578] of self communion, ending in that pale despair which strikes into the soul of every man whose soul is his own and who thinks. And if it is all Chance (a thought repellant and unbelievable to one who thinks) , or even the Great Unchance of fixed, immutable, but unloving and uncaring Law—as many believe—then why suffer to this palsied, dust-turning end?
GENERAL LEW WALLACE
From the lips of babes, from the humble and the ignorant, what wisdom! ”

“ His chief characteristic was towering and intolerant mastery of men, his greatest foible was his love for a race-horse, and he left nothing further to be done in following both bents, and yet he was actuated in everything by the highest conception of honor and principle, and imparted dignity and the virtue of his own indomitable character to every transaction in which he engaged.
The annals of men do not afford, and fiction has never conceived, an instance of more sublime devotion to womanhood than Andrew Jackson held for his wife. ”

“ The chief element of the American spirit is the appreciation of high ideals, not only in the national life, but in the education, the culture and the industrial life of the individual. When we see new openings on already established lines, it is characteristic of us as a people to pursue these openings, even though they lead in directions directly opposed to those which we have hitherto followed. Thoroughness and earnestness are the keynotes of American progress, and these are the characteristics which to-day give us our commanding position among the nations. ”

“ I saw a poor old bachelor live all the days of his life in sight of paradise, too cowardly to put his arm around it and press it to his bosom. He shaved and primped and resolved to marry every day in the year for forty years. But when the hour for love’s duel arrived, when he stood trembling in the presence of rosy cheeks and glancing eyes, and beauty shook her curls and gave the challenge, his courage always oozed away, and he fled ingloriously from the field of honor. ”

“ There is a mighty power moving on those restless tides; they are sowing and reaping for the helpless and the innocent; Love hath written his name in every heart, and in every life there is a love story. ”

“ There, from the first, he took his place easily and naturally as a leader of men and began to work out that great destiny which will link his name indissolubly with liberty and free government as long as men love to be free, the symbol of the soundest and strongest fundamental principle in government ever conceived by man. ”

“ There will be an old clock resurrected on that day wearing a broadcloth coat buttoned up to the throat; and when he is wound up he will go off with a whizz and a bang. He will get up out of the dust shouting, “Hallelujah!” and he will proclaim “sanctification!” and “falling from grace!” as the only true doctrine by which men shall go sweeping through the pearly gates into the new Jerusalem. And he will be recognized as a Methodist preacher, a little noisy, a little clogged with chicken feathers, but ripe for the Kingdom of Heaven. ”

“ And while I dislike to sound in this assembly one discordant note—to strike one chord of the minor here—where all seem so satisfied, I feel that I shall not be true to the great cause of childhood if I fail to say what I do know. It is good for us, now and then, to be shown our shortcomings. It is well for us to see at times into our soul of souls. It is progress to search after [655] better things. Self-sufficiency is retrogression; self satisfaction is decay, and contentment is the sure messenger of degeneracy and death. There is no god as great as the God of Discontent. ”