William Rounseville Alger

“ To honor one's parents is the first scriptural commandment with promise.
It is a habit which no one will ever regret. But, alas! how many a man, how many a woman, has kneeled on the grave where father or mother lay mouldering, and has lamented, with burning tears of shame and sorrow, the disobedience, the disrespect, the unkindness, the neglect, shown in earlier years! How have they longed to lift up the faded forms from their coffins, to re-animate them, and to have them again in their homes, that, by unwearied ministrations of tenderness, they might atone for the upbraiding past! ”

“ Man is not capable of such pure devotion: only a woman could thus forbear, and be content with the secret joy of the beloved presence. Man demands action: woman demands emotion. Friendship between two youths is martial, adventurous, a trumpet-blast or a bugle-air: friendship between two girls is poetic, contemplative, the sigh of a harp-string or the swell of an organ-pipe.
Woman needs friendship more than man, because she is less self- sufficing. She is much more apt than he to think the form in the mirror is lovely, but not to think it of herself. ”

“ The cynical authors who deal chiefly in ridicule and satire, or in what they call solid facts, the alternate levity and bitterness of whose writings tend to destroy all ingenuous faith and glowing affection, all magnanimous sympathies and hopes, seem to me to be engaged in as miserable a business as those African hunters who train falcons to dart on gazelles, and pick out their beautiful eyes. The illusiveness of life that results from teeming love and trust is as a mist of gold sifted into the atmosphere, through which all the objects of our regard loom, colossal and glittering. ”

“ Lo! one morning, something almost imperceptible steals on the beauty of this passion, like the first wrinkle on the front of an adored woman. The breath and perfume of love expire in these pages of youth, as an evening breeze dies upon the flowers. We feel it, but are unwilling to confess it. Our letters become shorter and fewer, are filled with news, with descriptions, with foreign matters; and, if any thing happens to delay them, we are less disturbed. On the subject of loving and being loved, we have grown reasonable. ”

“ Poetry, it has been said, is balm on the wounds of non- fulfilment in our lives. When our own experience and imagination are wanting in that balm, we must borrow it from others. If we muse, with open heart, on the enthusiastic dreams and fruitions of more richly impassioned or more happily placed natures, the contagious glow of their affections may enkindle ours. This is one of the highest uses of art, a use which puts on artists the duty of setting before their patrons sights of righteousness and bliss, trust and peace, rather than sights of wretchedness, wrangling, doubt, and error. ”

“ My attachment for you will, without doubt, be a consolation; but that word, when not unmeaning, is so sad that I desire my friendship to fulfil higher offices. I often envy characters whose impressions are slight and transient. The sponge passes across the slate, and nothing is left. Perhaps such a nature best agrees with man, whose pleasures are for a moment, whose pains for a life. Adieu, my friend! How many times already that word has filled my heart with grief! Take good care of yourself; hasten to God; and, when the struggle is too severe, beseech grace instead of combating. ”

“ They were equally endowed with loveliness of person, attractiveness of mind, elevation of character, and perfection of manners. They were the magic centres of every circle in which they moved together. When the plague, of which all Paris was in terror, seized Madame de Rambouillet's youngest son, she nursed him; and Julie shut herself in the room with them till the boy died. The sweet harmony of their souls and intercourse was unmarred, unalloyed, in life and in death. Some mothers make slaves of their daughters; some are slaves to them; some even find rivals in them. ”

“ If her misfortunes were august, solemn, and terrible as a Greek tragedy, her heart was large, high, and strong enough to meet them. With all her gentleness, Christian and womanly patience, the most striking feature in her character was its moral grandeur.
"Greatness of mind and nobleness
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe
About her, as a guard angelic placed."
Such a woman is the highest exemplar and benefactor of her sex. A religious quality is evoked in the soul that contemplates her. Every impure feeling is struck dead with awe before her. ”

“ School-girls often have their distinctly defined and well-understood degrees of intimacy—their first, their second, their third, friend. Thus a thousand little dramas are daily played, full of delights and woes, of which outsiders, who have no key to them, never so much as dream. Probably no chapter of sentiment in modern fashionable life is so intense and rich as that which covers the experience of budding maidens at school. In their mental caresses, spiritual nuptials, their thoughts kiss each other, and more than all the blessedness the world will ever give them is foreshadowed. ”

“ Accordingly, indifference is the shield of polite society, and affectation is the valve of artificial characters; but sincerity of soul is the first charm of manners, and extent of sympathy is the proper measure of happiness. The soul, dried and hardened by the heat and wear of crowds, or exhausted by dissipation, measures its success by how much it can exclude, how much it despises, how much it can save; but the glory of youth, the joy of genius, the height and charm of life, is the exuberance of the expenditure of force they can afford. ”

“ How many a man of genius has been chiefly indebted for his achievements to the wife who has sedulously identified herself with his success, ever at his side, unseen perhaps by the world, studying his art, lightening his tasks, soothing his pride, healing his hurts, stimulating his confidence, baffling his enemies, gaining him patrons or allies, assuaging his falls, refreshing his energy for new trials, and, when he has triumphed, and is applauded on his eminence, silently drinking in, as her reward, the popular admiration bestowed on him. ”

“ Rich and soaring souls have a self-sufficing modesty, which, in its own exuberance, asks but little from others. The lark, when, at sunrise, she rises, singing, above our sight, shows that it was not from lack of power to climb, that she made the humble choice to build her nest in the grass. Here lies the most elect office of woman—to attract and train men to the sober and blissful ends of wisdom and love, and withdraw their passions from the wretched ends of folly, on which so many waste their lives, in ploughing the air, sowing the sea, and trying to catch the wind with a net. ”

“ Love makes obedience lighter than liberty. Man wears a noble allegiance, not as a collar, but as a garland. The Graces are never so lovely as when seen waiting on the Virtues; and, where they thus dwell together, they make a heavenly home.
No affection, save friendship, has any sure eternity in it. Friendship ought, therefore, always to be cultivated in love itself, as its only certain guard and preservative, not less than as the only sufficing substitute in its absence. A couple joined by love without friendship, walk on gunpowder with torches in their hands. ”

“ The ardor with which a pure and generous woman enters into choice states of soul in another is a redemptive sight. This capacity of swift perception and sympathy makes the friendship of a woman a precious boon to a man who aims at greatness or perfection; and scarcely ever has there been an illustrious man who has not been appreciated, comforted, and inspired in secret by some woman long before he became famous, circling around him with her unselfish ministrations, like that star which is the invisible companion of Sirius. ”

“ No wonder if, vexed, hurt, goaded half to madness, he gets enraged, and unseemly contentions ensue, followed by painful depression and remorseful grief. No wonder if he finds it hard indeed to forget or to forgive the infliction of an evil so incomparably profound and frightful. There is, to a high smiled man, no wrong more hurtful or more difficult to pardon than to have mean motives falsely ascribed to him, to be placed by misinterpretation on a lower plane than that where he belongs. Every such experience stabs the moral source of life, and draws blood from the soul itself. ”

“ The true remedy for the melancholy stagnation or the frightful effervescence of their existence is not indeed to call them forth into a contest with men for the notice of society and the prizes of the world; but to give them their liberty, remanding them to their own consciences and the social sanctions of the great laws of right and wrong, to educate them to the highest point in every department of knowledge and sentiment, and to throw open to them the boundless field of private and public moral influence, with a fair chance for the achievement of happiness. ”

“ The beautiful image of the daughter, loved to the verge of distraction, seemed gradually to occupy the whole being of the mother. For, as Madame de Sévigné successively lost her idolized husband and her most endeared friend, the unhappy Fouquet, the maternal instinct seemed to take up into itself all the baffled or bereaved passions, and, magnified and vivified by the appropriation, to transform itself into a friendship which almost annihilated her individuality, beneath the ideal stamp and transfused impression of that of her daughter. ”

“ I have the misfortune to be fonder of you than of any thing else in the world, and my heart had from of old built in you its happiness. Youth gone, and life declining, I looked forward to quitting the scene with Maurice. At any time of life, a great affection is a great happiness: the spirit comes to take refuge in it entirely. Oh, delight and joy, which will never be your sister's portion! Only in the direction of God shall I find an issue for my heart to love, as it has the notion of loving, and as it has the power of loving. ”

“ These superficial and miserable vices of common society disenchant the soul, and dry up the springs of love and hope. They are fatal to that magnanimous wisdom and that trustful sympathy which compose at once the brightest ornaments of our nature, and the costliest treasures of experience. Ah, if, in place of them, we could everywhere meet the honest hand, the open heart, the serious mind, the frank voice, the upward eye, the emulous and helpful soul largely endowed with knowledge and reverence! ”

“ To those who knew and enjoyed the friendship of Miss Benger, her writings, pleasing and beautiful as they are, were the smallest part of her merit and her attraction. Endowed with the warmest and most grateful of human hearts, she united to the utmost delicacy and nobleness of sentiment, active benevolence, which knew no limit but the furthest extent of her ability, and a boundless enthusiasm for the good and fair, wherever she discovered them. ”

“ Soul is wanting in them. I love you is merely an expression of habit, a necessary form, the I have the honor to be of the love letter. Little by little the style freezes where it inflamed. The post day, no longer eagerly anticipated, is rather dreaded; writing has become a fatigue. We blush to think of the madnesses we have trusted to paper, and wish we could recall our letters and burn them. What has happened? Is it a new attachment which begins where an old one ends? No: it is love dying in advance of the object loved. ”

“ What is the ideal of perfect society? Is it a state where there is a universal contention for notice, power, and honor? Then let women enter that contest now. Is it a state where each is content with the personal fruition of his own powers, in harmony with the same enjoyment by all others? Then let women, by setting such an example of abstinence from the public realm of politics, draw men also to their true happiness, in "the realm of home and morals."
Turning from the authority of history to the authority of moral science, there is no reason for the enslavement of woman to man. ”

“ Arrayed in her divine charms; armed with irresistible goodness and archness; enriched with equal wisdom and uprightness, every movement a mixture of grace and dignity; protected by an aureole of purity which always surrounded her; walking among common mortals, "like a goddess on a cloud," she made it the business of her life to soften the asperities, listen to the' plans, sympathize with the disappointments, stimulate the powers, encourage the efforts, praise the achievements, and enjoy the triumphs, of her friends. ”

“ The love of woman has in all ages given birth in man to passionate desires, poetic dreams, deferential attentions, persuasive forms of politeness; but only once in the whole of history has this softening, quickening, exalting power restrained from a destructive outlet, and stimulated to an unparalleled richness of manifestation, stamped with chastity by the dominant conscience and imagination of the time broken out in one great swell as an inspiration to glorious deeds, illuminating the world, and making an immortal epoch. ”