Various

“ Hence, like the best-attested stories of ghosts or spirits, the thing that most strikes us is the absence of what we hold to be soul—that is, of superior, emancipated intelligence. They come for little or no object; they seldom speak, if they do come; they utter no ideas above those of an ordinary person on earth. These American spirit-seers have published volumes of communications in prose and verse, which they assert to be given in the names of the most illustrious dead—Shakespeare, Bacon, heaven knows whom. ”

“ It never seems to occur to him that he might advantageously return indoors, and there mention what he has forgotten in a private and proper way. The instant the lost idea strikes him—which it invariably does, either in his front garden or in the roadway outside his house—he roars for his wife, either from the gravel walk or over the low wall, and (if I may use so strong an expression) empties his mind to her in public, without appearing to care whose ears he wearies, whose delicacy he shocks, or whose ridicule he invites. ”

“ Then masons built the stone pillars and hung the great bell, and on a day came Kublai-Chan to ring it for the first time, and with him, at his right hand, Kuang Sai, whom he delighted to honor.
“And when all things were prepared, Kublai-Chan, the great king, drew back the striking-beam with all force, and rang the great bell, and sound came forth, deep, sweet, and full as the voices of the gods.
“Far, far away spread the circles of sound, even to the edge of the kingdom. The multitudes gathered around and fell down before that voice in rows, as corn before the reaper. ”

“ Intellectually, we do not think that the statesmen of Austria, Spain, and Russia are the equals of those of France and the United States, while the English commoners have given a remarkable account of themselves.
We should be disposed to applaud the good sense of any rich young American who married a beautiful girl of poor but decent antecedents, in spite of the fact that such marriages depend upon unreasoning sexual attraction, like the great majority of marriages. As it is, we can only note the care Nature takes of a race, however heedless she may be of the individual. ”

“ We once owned a cat who would listen complacently to music by the hour together, always accompanying it with a gentle purring—who would leave her hunting-ground in garden or cellar whenever music was going on in parlor or drawing-room—who would scratch at the door, and croon and mew to be let in, and would resent a prolonged exclusion by certain expressive displays of disapprobation. When admitted, she would leap on the piano, and attempt, after the New Zealand fashion of expressing regard, to rub noses with the performer. ”

“ No great movement is permanent until placed on an educational basis. Whatever enters the public mind through the schools enters as sunshine and rain into the fiber of the oak. A world-wide movement is now in progress, having as its object not the reformation of human nature, not the disbanding of all armies and navies, but simply the establishment of a better means than war for the settling of the disputes that must occur as long as the nations endure.
Already great results have been accomplished. Arbitration has been substituted for war in the majority of the cases. ”

“ Fame and Fortune Await Those Who Rescue from Oblivion’s Great Storage-House Bits of Knowledge That Enabled Old-Time Workmen to Obtain Results That Cannot be Duplicated To-day. The nineteenth century was distinctively a century of invention. Whether the twentieth is destined to rival it by making discoveries that will rank with steam, electricity, wireless telegraphy, the harvester and the typewriter it is now too soon to say. ”

“ Early risers descant rapturously upon the delicious freshness of the morning air and other delights which it is reported can be enjoyed about sunrise, against which may be offset the loveliness of the dying day, the deepening shadows of the twilight, and the charm of moonlight. The glories of the dawn rest in rumor only to the most of us, and must be taken on faith. The suffrages of the majority are for the sunset, and the majority rules in the Republic. ”

“ I have mastered great secrets by the power of will. True, by will and by science I can retard the process of years, but death comes not by age alone. Can I frustrate the accidents which bring death upon the young? ”

“ Senta herself sits apart, gazing sentimentally at a portrait over the door—the portrait of the Flying Dutchman.
The gay song of her friends irritates her, and she bids them cease.
“Then sing us a better song yourself!” they cry.
Senta accepts the challenge, and sings the ballad of “The Flying Dutchman.” At its close she jumps up and cries that she will be the woman to save the suffering mariner.
A few minutes later Daland enters, accompanied by the Dutchman. Senta’s eyes leap away from her father to the man beside him. Speechless and immobile she stares at the face of her dreams. ”

“ In revenge, puss is generally as indifferent to the sublimest strains of the human voice or cunningly played instrument as any post can possibly be, and prefers the untuneful scream of the cat’s-meat man to the noblest compositions of Beethoven.
Cats Have Musical Ears. Still, as if nature was determined to assert the triumph of harmony over every living thing, now and then a cat turns up who has a genuine musical ear, and will manifest unequivocal satisfaction and delight at harmonious combinations of sound. ”

“ Such a man might exist; such a man as I have described I see now before me—Duke of ——, in the court of ——, dividing time between lust and brawl, alchemists and wizards; again, in the last century, charlatan and criminal, with name less noble, domiciled in the house at which you gazed to-day, and flying from the law you had outraged, none knew whither; traveler once more revisiting London with the same earthly passion which filled your heart when races now no more walked through yonder streets ”

“ In the year 1793, when Philadelphia lost a sixth of its population by yellow fever, and most of its citizens had fled, Girard personally took the inside management of a pest-house, ignoring all other business for two months. In one hundred days of that autumn the burials in the city exceeded four thousand.
At forty years of age Girard had only a competence, and wrote to a friend: “I do not value fortune. The love of labor is my highest ambition. I observe with pleasure that you have a numerous family and that you are in possession of an honest fortune. ”

“ That such a power might extend over the dead—that is, over certain thoughts and memories that the dead may still retain—and compel, not that which ought properly to be called the SOUL, and which is far beyond human reach, but rather a fantom of what has been most earth-stained on earth, to make itself apparent to our senses—is a very ancient though obsolete theory, upon which I will hazard no opinion. ”

“ And so, I say it most confidently, the first intellectual task of our age is rightly to order and make serviceable the vast realm of printed material which four centuries have swept across our path. To organize our knowledge, to systematize our reading, to save, out of the relentless cataract of ink, the immortal thoughts of the greatest—this is a necessity unless the productive ingenuity of man is to lead us at last to a measureless and pathless chaos. To know anything that turns up is in the infinity of knowledge to know nothing. ”

“ Chemistry, one might Imagine, is the science which has, perhaps, made the greatest strides during the last five or six decades. Yet modern chemists cannot compound such dyes as were commonly used when the great nations of to-day were still unborn. Now and again it happens that searchers after antiquities come across fragments of fabrics which were dyed thousands of years ago, and they are astonished by the wonderful richness of the colors of the cloths, which, despite their age, are brighter and purer than anything we can produce. ”

“ There be men who would have died, but living among pictures and statues and singing men and women does not breed the courage that says ‘Then I can die.’
“On the day of the last casting, what time the pot bubbled full of red hot metal, over which floated light clouds of heat, came Kuang Sai, leading by the hand his little daughter, Fen Sai, blooming as a white water-lily, tripping on her little pearl-embroidered shoes, chattering and laughing in her father’s face. ”

“ The American college fraternity has become a farce, educational and social, intellectual and moral, so great that even but few fraternity leaders appreciate it. At more than one college, chapter-houses have done away with the need of dormitories. As colleges have grown larger and more unwieldy, and the members of the faculties have been less frequently in personal touch with their students, the fraternities have in no slight degree taken the place of the old small-college units, alumni now influencing the undergraduates through their fraternities, much as the professors used to. ”

“ Will any sensitive person—especially a person of my own sex—please to imagine what I must suffer as a delicate single lady, at having all these family details obtruded on my attention, whether I like it or not, in the major’s rasping martial voice, and in the shrill answering screams of the women inside? ”

“ From that seaport he embarked with his wife, an opera and a half, a diminutive purse, and a Newfoundland dog, on a sailing-vessel to London, and thence to Paris.
Before leaving Riga, Wagner had read the legend of the Flying Dutchman, who was condemned to sail forever till the love of a faithful woman should release him from this curse. Among the wild storms of Wagner’s own voyage, in the wild romance of the passage through Northern fiords, he became obsessed by the story. ”

“ He was the first American to write vers de société that deserved preservation, and that were at once light, amusing, and in good taste.
Willis affected an extreme elegance in dress, manner, and surroundings. He pretended to write amid rare flowers, with old vines beside him, and to use an amber penholder in the summer to cool his palm. Those who disliked this display of foppery were wont to explain the initials of his name as representing “Namby-Pamby.” But with all his superficial frivolity, Willis was a man of genuine talent. ”

“ My own way of doing business is perhaps novel, but it is neither harsh nor unfair. But it is novel, and therefore the men I deal with object to it, although they themselves are the gainers by doing things my way and not the way in which they are used. Yet they regard me with suspicion. It is very much as if you offered a man five dollars for doing something for which he had previously been in the habit of receiving a dollar, and having him denounce you as a swindler. ”

“ But, of course, there are stepmothers and stepmothers, and doubtless the woman who makes a poor stepmother would make a poor mother if she had children of her own.
As a popular prejudice the aversions to stepmothers has little more basis in fact than the aversion to mothers-in-law. Most men, in spite of the professional humorists, are on excellent terms with their mothers-in-law, and most women who have married daughters are excessively fond of their sons-in-law. At its best the mother-in-law joke was never a very good joke. Its humor consists largely in its not being true. ”

“ Pictures of moonlight lovers strolling along moonlit lanes, rowing on moonlit rivers, in moonlit boats, moonlight gleaners and the harvest home have been painted over and over again in word and color, but the why and wherefor of the extraordinary brilliance of the Queen of Night during the period that she is known as the “harvest moon” has been completely lost sight of by the great majority. ”

“ While Europe Has the Most Aristocratic, the Cleanest, and the Most Beautiful, the United States Has the Highest and the Most Wealthy. There is always interest in the superlative. The biggest things, the smallest things, the ugliest and the most graceful are important only when compared with the rest of their kind. Every city in the world has its attractive roads and streets as well as its ugly ones.
The highest street in the world is Main Street, In Denver; the richest is Fifth Avenue, in New York City; the widest is Market Street, in Philadelphia; and the shortest is the Rue Blé in Paris. ”

“ Jane’s theory, that hate makes a good fighter, it is as false to-day as it was in the heyday of chivalry. The poet is right in his view that “the bravest are the tenderest, the loving are the daring.”
The old British idea, inherited from the teachings of Nelson and his half-corsair predecessors, that an Englishman “should hate a Frenchman like the devil,” is a sentiment that could well have had its origin in the place to which Nelson went for his sprightly imagery.
The best fighters of the world to-day are the men who can remain cool, unperturbed, unblinded by passion in the midst of battle. ”

“ We can teach in our schools that peace hath her victories no less renowned than war. We are learning to exalt a new type of heroism—the heroism of the social settlement of the city missionary, of the men and women who are devoting their lives to the uplifting of social conditions in the heart of our great cities. ”

“ It was Governor Douglas who settled the disastrous Fall River strike, after a number of futile attempts had been made to bring about an understanding, and his findings appealed to both sides, for the workers knew he had once worked in the mill and the employers recognized his acute business sense.
Fortune. Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as she best pleases, being the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own happy or unhappy condition. ”

“ No man or woman is so strong as to be wholly free from weakness. If a man occupies an humble sphere in life he usually is fortunate enough to keep his fads and follies from becoming known beyond his own circle of friends. If, on the other hand, he has attained sufficient distinction in the world to be called “famous,” he must reconcile himself to seeing the public in possession of all knowledge that has to do with his personal peculiarities.
Descartes had a small garden where he spent all the hours not devoted to mental labor. ”

“ In London you buy your program from the young woman who shows you to your seat, for whom this practical Clement Scott had no great liking. Of this young woman Mr. Scott said:
I prefer the American “usher,” with the suave but determined manner, to our haughty and flighty girls at home, who think it a condescension to show you to your seat, the whereabouts of which they are usually as ignorant of as you are yourself. ”