Albert Kesselring

“ From the summit we look down the northeastern slope of the mountains, upon the wide and beautiful Valley of Santa Clara, and the blue Bay of San Francisco shimmering-in the distance through the light veil of autumnal vapor which hangs over it, and drapes with a robe of royal purple the Valley of Alameda and the mountain heights beyond. ”

“ And at the Winter Solstice the earth was wrinkled with frost, the trees were leafless, and the Sun, reaching the most Southern point in his career, seemed to hesitate whether to continue descending, to leave the world to darkness and despair, or to turn upon his steps and retrace his course to the Northward, bringing back seed-time and Spring, and green leaves and flowers, and all the delights of love. ”

“ The noise of wheels rattling swiftly over the gravel walks, horses galloping away to the mountains; then the loud clangor of the hotel bell, and the long-drawn whistle of the locomotive, awaken us betimes in the morning. ”

“ Without a belief in Him, life is miserable, the world is dark, the Universe disrobed of its splendors, the intellectual tie to nature broken, the charm of existence dissolved, the great hope of being lost; and the mind, like a star struck from its sphere, wanders through the infinite desert of its conceptions, without attraction, tendency, destiny, or end. ”

“ Varying every hour, the million occasions will come in which we may restrain our passions, subdue our hearts to gentleness and patience, resign our own interest for another's advantage, speak words of kindness and wisdom, raise the fallen, cheer the fainting and sick in spirit, and soften and assuage the weariness and bitterness of their mortal lot. ”

“ Life is what we make it, and the world is what we make it. The eyes of the cheerful and of the melancholy man are fixed upon the same creation; but very different are the aspects which it bears to them. To the one, it is all beauty and gladness; the waves of ocean roll in light, and the mountains are covered with day. ”

“ The evil deed may be done in a single moment; but conscience never dies, memory never sleeps; guilt never can become innocence; and remorse can never whisper peace.
Beware, thou who art tempted to evil! Beware what thou layest up for the future! Beware what thou layest up in the archives of eternity! Wrong not thy neighbor! ”

“ Immortality stands waiting to give a recompense for every virtue not rewarded, for every tear not wiped away, for every sorrow undeserved, for every prayer, for every pure intention and emotion of the heart. ”

“ It conducts and controls the Universe, all spheres, all worlds, all actions of mankind, and of every animate and inanimate creature. It speaks in the soul of every man who lives. The Stars, the Earth, the Trees, the Winds, the universal voice of Nature, tempest, and avalanche, the Sea's roar and the grave voice of the waterfall, the hoarse thunder and the low whisper of the brook, the song of birds, the voice of love, the speech of men, all are the alphabet in which it communicates itself to men, and informs them of the will and law of God, the Soul of the Universe. ”

“ The truth comes to us tinged and colored with our prejudices and our preconceptions, which are as old as ourselves, and strong with a divine force. It comes to us as the image of a rod comes to us through the water, bent and distorted. An argument sinks into and convinces the mind of one man, while from that of another it rebounds like a ball of ivory dropped on marble. It is no merit in a man to have a particular faith, excellent and sound and philosophic as it may be, when he imbibed it with his mother's milk. It is no more a merit than his prejudices and his passions. ”

“ The murmuring of the brooks is a discord to him, the great roar of the sea has an angry and threatening emphasis, the solemn music of the pines sings the requiem of his departed happiness; the cheerful light shines garishly upon his eyes and offends him. The great train of the seasons passes before him like a funeral procession; and he sighs, and turns impatiently away. The eye makes that which it looks upon; the ear makes its own melodies and discords; the world without reflects the world within.
Let the Mason never forget that life and the world are what we make them by our social character ”

“ How many depressed minds should we console! How many troubles in society should we compose! How many enmities soften! How many a knot of mystery and misunderstanding would be untied by a single word, spoken in simple and confiding truth! ”

“ The verdure on the hills is magnificent, and wonderfully soothing to the eye grown wearied with the sight of the bare, red hills of Lower California, and blinking under the rays of the fierce sun of the tropics. ”

“ Soul of the Universe, eternal like it, immense like it, supremely active and potent in its varied operations, penetrating all parts of this vast body, impressing a regular and symmetrical movement on the spheres, making the elements instinct with activity and order, mingling with everything, organizing everything, vivifying and preserving everything,—this was the UNIVERSE-GOD which the ancients adored as Supreme Cause and God of Gods. ”

“ Be faithful to your friends; for true friendship is of a nature not only to survive through all the vicissitudes of life, but to continue through an endless duration; not only to stand the shock of conflicting opinions, and the roar of a revolution that shakes the world, but to last when the heavens are no more, and to spring fresh from the ruins of the universe. ”

“ The shower, the rain, and the storm pass away, the clouds vanish, and the bright stars again shine clearly upon the glad earth. The rain-drops sink into the ground, and gather in subterranean reservoirs, and run in subterranean channels, and bubble up in springs and fountains; and from the mountain-sides and heads of valleys the silver threads of water begin their long journey to the ocean. ”

“ Away back in the air, cutting sharply against the horizon, stand great pines, from whose broad-spreading branches float long steamers of green-gray moss, giving an air of great are and venerableness to the forest. ”

“ It is all over now and silent as the grave, save when a wandering party of pleasure-seekers penetrates here, as we have done, or the hunter climbs the rocky peaks in search of deer or a stray grizzly bear, and awakes the mountain echoes with the sharp crack of his rifle. ”

“ You behold a mighty avalanche, white and solid in appearance as Alpine snows, ever advancing to overwhelm you, but never reaching you. Two great eagles with snow-white heads circled around cañon and around over the dark canon below us, in which they had their nest. ”

“ I am proud of the daughters of my own loved land and here in this world of tropical beauty, still longed to walk once more among them, to hear the music, of their voices, and mark the air of independent self-possession which freedom gives, the bold, free step and proud grace of carriage which characterizes the haughty daughters of our conquering race. ”

“ The Great Being beheld the beauty of His own conception, which dwelt with Him alone from the beginning, Maia, or Nature's loveliness, at once the germ of passion and the source of worlds. Love became the universal parent, when the Deity, before remote and inscrutable, became ideally separated into the loving and the beloved. ”

“ The bare plain, and brown, verdureless hills weary the eye no longer, but instead fresh green chaparral and tall, full-foliaged trees stretch out on every side, and we ride down a road embowered with shrubbery, and dark with the cool shadows of evening. ”

“ We can constrain our tongues to be false, our features to bend themselves to the semblance of that passionate adoration which we wish to express, our knees to fall prostrate; but our heart we cannot constrain. ”

“ Happy moment when, emerging from a world of danger and of doubt, the soul shall settle down into the calmness and peace of that state where there is the assurance of God himself that that world of bliss is to be its eternal abode! ”

“ When men are seated in their pleasant places, sunken in ease and indolence, with Pretence and Incapacity and Littleness usurping all the high places of State, war is the baptism of blood and fire, by which alone they can be renovated. It is the hurricane that brings the elemental equilibrium, the concord of Power and Wisdom. ”

“ At times, the baleful fires of war light up half a Continent at once; as when all the Thrones unite to compel a people to receive again a hated and detestable dynasty, or States deny States the right to dissolve an irksome union and create for themselves a separate government. Then again the flames flicker and die away, and the fire smoulders in its ashes, to break out again, after a time, with renewed and a more concentrated fury. At times, the storm, revolving, howls over small areas only; at times its lights are seen, like the old beacon-fires on the hills, belting the whole globe. ”

“ Timid to the last degree she seems, and probably is, and she looks neither to the right nor the left, but keeps her eyes fixed on the plank beneath her, as if anxious to avoid the sight of everything else in the world. As she stands there in the open gangway, she looks the perfect counterpart of something we have seen, or dreamed of, before. ”

“ Evermore the human soul struggles toward the light, toward God, and the Infinite. It is especially so in its afflictions. Words go but a little way into the depths of sorrow. The thoughts that writhe there in silence, that go into the stillness of Infinitude and Eternity, have no emblems. ”

“ Life, to him, flashes, rejoicing, upon every flower and every tree that trembles in the breeze. There is more to him, everywhere, than the eye sees; a presence of profound joy on hill and valley, and bright, dancing water. ”

“ A full, round face, soft, dark brown hair, large, lustrous, black eyes, complexion just tinged with the hue of the olive, cheeks like the ripe, red peach, bright red lips, contrasting with the pearly teeth, and a slender, petite figure, moving with a willowy grace through the dreamily voluptuous mazes of the danza ”

“ The beauty of Love, the charm of Friendship, the sacredness of Sorrow, the heroism of Patience, the noble Self-sacrifice, these and their like, alone, make life to be life indeed, and are its grandeur and its power. They are the priceless treasures and glory of humanity ”

“ Every familiar step is more than a story in a land of enchantment. The power of movement is as mysterious as the power of thought. Memory, and dreams that are the indistinct echoes of dead memories are alike inexplicable. ”

“ There are no tokens of public mourning for the calamity of the soul. Men weep when the body dies; and when it is borne to its rest, they follow it with sad and mournful procession. But for the dying soul there is no open lamentation; for the lost soul there are no obsequies. ”

“ One stream of life flows there, with ten thousand intermingled branches and channels, through all the homes of human love. One sound as of many waters, a rapturous jubilee or a mournful sighing, comes up from, the congregated dwellings of a whole nation. ”

“ Who can sum up the horrors and woes accumulated in a single war? Masonry is not dazzled with all its pomp and circumstance, all its glitter and glory. War comes with its bloody hand into our very dwellings. ”

“ Soon the road leaves the bed of the stream, and becomes a narrow path, cut with infinite labor along the side of a precipice, over which you can look as you ride along, and drop a stone down hundreds of feet before it strikes the rocks, and goes bounding and awakening echoes down to the bottom of the canon. ”

“ Not more naturally does the beaver build or the mocking-bird sing his own wild, gushing melody, than the true Mason lives in this beautiful outward life. So from the perennial spring swells forth the stream, to quicken the meadow with new access of green, and perfect beauty bursting into bloom. Thus Masonry does the work it was meant to do. The Mason does not sigh and weep, and make grimaces. He lives right on. If his life is, as whose is not, marked with errors, and with sins, he ploughs over the barren spot with his remorse, sows with new seed, and the old desert blossoms like a rose. ”

“ He left Chester in 1876 for Bettws-y-Coed, North Wales, with the purpose of studying landscape; one of the results was 'The Fairy Glen,' exhibited at the Liverpool Exhibition, 1877, but he again returned to Chester, and died at Christleton, near that city, 25 Feb. 1884.
Huggins was a constant exhibitor at the Royal Academy from 1846 till within a few years of his death, and at the exhibitions at Liverpool, Manchester, Dublin, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. His horses, cattle, and poultry pictures were his best and most characteristic work, good in drawing, and remarkable for brilliance of colour ”

“ A nation becomes truly one, with one large heart and a single throbbing pulse. Men are invisibly present to each other, as if already spiritual beings; and the thinker who sits in an Alpine solitude, unknown to or forgotten by all the world, among the silent herds and hills, may flash his words to all the cities and over all the seas. ”

“ Up a steep hillside, past tall pine trees, like those of the Sierra Nevada, along a steep, narrow "hog-back" of crumbling, shelvy stone, running through a waste of the bitter, worthless chemisal, a plant which grows only on land too barren to support anything else; then up another sharper and more stony hill, and we pass through a scrubby thicket, and suddenly emerge on the summit of the mountain.
We stand for a moment in silence, looking down on the world at our feet. Words utterly fail to convey the faintest idea of the grandeur of the scene which bursts on our startled vision. ”

“ I stand again on the Red Desert, hot, blistering sand beneath my feet, a brazen sky all aflame above, and bare, red mountains flickering in the reflected rays of the fierce, blazing sun of the south, around me, gazing on a scene so sad, that even I, bitter Indian-hater that I am and must be. ”