Elihu Burritt

“ Elihu Burritt attributed his first success in self-improvement, not to genius, which he disclaimed, but simply to the careful employment of those invaluable fragments of time, called “odd moments.” While working and earning his living as a blacksmith, he mastered some eighteen ancient and modern languages, and twenty-two European dialects.
What a solemn and striking admonition to youth is that inscribed on the dial at All Souls, Oxford—“Pereunt et imputantur”—the hours perish, and are laid to our charge. Time is the only little fragment of Eternity that belongs to man ”

“ His stature is of the middle size, head well developed, with eyes deeply set, and a prepossessing countenance, though not handsome; he wears an exterior of remarkable austerity, and everything about him is grave, even to his smile. Being well versed in the languages, ancient and modern, he does not lack variety or imagination, either in his public addresses or private conversation; yet it would be difficult to find a man with a better heart, or sweeter spirit, than Elihu Burritt. ”

“ He came to the pulpit without the loss of a single lock of his young manhood's strength. That classical culture that so often exhausts the vital heat of the soul in producing mental brilliance, had not sobered or softened the pulse of a single faculty within him. He entered upon his work with all his young enthusiasm at full glow, and with all his great-eyed hope and faith, looking out grandly into the future. Thus, at the outset of his ministry, he threw into it all the native eloquence of his heart ”

“ Devoting herself to social reform, she held, when about twenty, large meetings of navvies who were employed in a suburb of Cambridge. A club and institute were built through her efforts. Elihu Burritt, the American writer, attested the power of her addresses in his 'Seed Lives' (1863) . In 1865 she published 'English Idylls and other Poems,' dedicated to her father, 'to whom I owe all I am.' After his death in 1866, an incurable illness caused her at intervals acute suffering but failed to affect her spirit. ”

“ It is time for Elihu Burritt to go back to his shop: the world wants a new fool.
John Mills, remembered by some unfortunate New-Yorkers as John St. Hugh Mills, has written half a dozen tolerable novels since he went home, and he is now publishing, in the United Service Magazine, a series of papers illustrative of his American travels, in which he illustrates his knowledge and veracity by certain anecdotes, which are described as having occurred on "the western prairies of Louisiana." ”

“ Nothing, in this connection, is more remarkable, than the rapid turgescence of every man’s confidence, in his own abilities, upon the slightest encouragement, from his neighbor. There has been scarcely a blacksmith in New England, since the remarkable and merited success of Elihu Burritt, who, if you ask his opinion of the efficacy of pennyroyal for the stomach-ache, will not, with your permission, of course, prescribe for any acute or chronic complaint, with which you are afflicted. ”

“ This made walking painful to the King, as his shoes were filled with water and gravel. The night was very dark, and, as he oftentimes pleasantly remarked, he would have lost his guide had it not been for the rustling of Richard's calfskin breeches. They arrived at Woolf's house in Madeley about midnight, and Richard knocked them up from their beds. The daughter came first to the door, and without a moment's hesitation as to her loyalty, he told her the King was there, who was immediately welcomed to their fireside. ”

“ Humphrey, the owner, who was walking by his side, defended his faithful beast, it is said, in the smart rejoinder: "My liege! can you blame the horse to go heavily when he has the weight of three kingdoms on his back?" At Penford Mill, about two miles from Moseley, on the advice of his guides, the King dismounted, and they proceeded the rest of the way by a private and safer path, and reached the appointed meeting-place in a little grove near the house. Here the Penderels left their royal charge in the hands of Lord Wilmot and the others waiting to receive him. ”

“ I always love to visit their busy hamlets and hear the music of their little clicking hammers, which do not disturb the birds, but seem to set them singing around the lowly roofs and cosy little gardens of the nailers with extra glee. ”

“ Standing among the emblems of his love and good works, the serene and benevolent face seems to beam with the living smile of a beating heart, and the half-extended arm and the open palm to be warm with the pulse of their old sweet life, as if still inviting the African slave-child or the homeless orphan to climb up against his bosom. ”

“ It has now reached such an altitude, and it shines with such lustre, that our imagination can hardly find the way down to the morning horizon of its life, and measure its scope and power in the dim twilight of its first hours in time. ”

“ It goes up over the roof-trees of the rural hamlet on the wings of its song, as if to train the rural soul to trial flights heavenward. Never did the Creator put a voice of such volume into so small a living thing. ”

“ It runs up and down the horizon like summer lightning, crimsoning the edges of the clouds, and the patches of sky between. This light is the halo around the brow of swart and patient Labour—that knows no rest while wealth is dreaming in its sleep. ”

“ The soft mosaic work of the gently rounded hills, or figures wrought in wheat, barley, oats, beans, turnips, and meadow and pasture land, and grouped into landscapes in endless alternation of lights and shades, and all this happy little world now veiled by the low, summer clouds, now flooded by a sunburst between them—all these lovely and changing sceneries made my walk like one through a continuous gallery of paintings. ”

“ The most beautiful landscapes rotate around a locomotive axis confusedly. Green pastures and yellow wheat fields are in a whirl. Tall and venerable trees get into the wake of the same motion, and the large, pied cows ruminating in their shade, seem to lie on the revolving arc of an indefinite circle. The views dissolve before their best aspect is caught by the eye. ”

“ Here he passes before his eye all that Adam saw and named, and more too—all things that bloom and breathe with sweet odours in Nature's realm: the flowers of every zone; the birds of every land and plumage; every beast from the elephant to the winged mouse; every fish from the whale to the minnow of the thinnest brook; human histories reaching back to the holiest hours of Eden ”

“ He will be struck at the loftiness of the sky; at the vividness of its blue and gold, the sharp, unsoftened light of the stars, and, as it were, the contracted pupil of the sun’s eye at mid-day. The sunset glories of our western heavens play upon a ground of rigid blue. ”

“ It mounts up like a human aspiration. It seems to spread out its wings and to be lifted straight upwards out of sight by the afflatus of its own happy heart. To pour out this in undulating rivulets of rhapsody is apparently the only motive of its ascension. This it is that has made it so loved of all generations. It is the singing angel of man’s nearest heaven, whose vital breath is music. ”

“ How unnatural, and, more, almost profane and inhuman, is the fiery locomotion of the Iron Horse through these densely-peopled towns! now the screech, the roar, and the darkness of cavernous passages under paved streets, church vaults, and an acre or two of three-story brick houses, with the feeling of a world of breathing, bustling humanity incumbent upon you;—now the dash and flash out into the light, and the higgledy-piggledy glimpses of the next five minutes. ”

“ The very pallet in which their young cheeks are half buried looks as if you might blow up wrinkles in it with your breath. I should not wonder if, now and then, a tender mother approaching them, has softened her step unconsciously as if loth to wake them up out of such sweet repose, for they look tired, not dead. ”

“ In these beautiful features, England surpasses all other countries in the world. These make the peculiar charm of her rural scenery to a traveller from abroad. These are the salient lineaments of Motherland’s face which the memories of myriads she has sent to people countries beyond the sea cling to with such fondness; memories that are transmitted from generation to generation; which no political revolutions nor severances affect; which are handed down in the unwritten legends of family life in the New World, as well as in the warp and woof of American literature and history. ”

“ It exalts every valley, brings high places low, makes rough places smooth, and forms a little world and walls it in with an horizon to fit and grace its own altitude. Far beyond the Severn sloped up the successive ranges of Welsh hills and mountains, as if they were the folds of the same azure cloud, that dipped its upper edge in the sun's nearer glory. ”

“ Samuel Johnson!—a nation that could build fifty cathedrals in ten years would need a century for building such another man as he was to the world of mind and thought. Here, as you stand by his monument in the market-place, with several of the most touching incidents of his life carved in the stone, you feel yourself standing in the disk of a living and immortal reputation—more than a reputation; more than the illuminated shadow of a great memory. It is a sensible and commanding presence; it is a great individuality that absorbs and covers the whole city. ”

“ It is a city of magnipotent chimneys; and they stand thick and tall on the hills and in the valleys around, and puff their black breathings into the face and eyes of the sky above, baconising its countenance, and giving it no time to wash up and look sober, calm and clean, except a few hours on the sabbath. ”

“ Is the faith too fanciful or irreverent that believes, that the corridors and inner temples of Heaven’s Glory will be hung with these biographs of His servants surrounding, like stars, the light-flood of His love that radiated from His cross on earth? ”

“ Lichfield is the clasp-jewel of the gold-and-green embroidered zone of the Black Country. Its cathedral is an edifice of which a whole nation might be proud, if possessing no other monument of beautiful architecture. The century-plant, that puts forth its white blossom only at the end of a hundred years, has its special reputation and place in the floral kingdom. This Staffordshire cathedral is a millenium plant, which has unfolded the exquisite petals and leaves of its great and beautiful blossom of architecture at the end of ten centuries of steady growing. ”

“ The three great, distinctive graces of an English landscape are the hawthorn hedges, the hedge-row trees, and the everlasting and unapproachable greenness of the grass-fields they surround and embellish. ”

“ And all the while, the furnaces roar and glow by night and day, and the great steam hammers thunder, and hammers from an ounce in weight to a ton, and every kind of machinery invented by man, are ringing, clicking, and whizzing as if tasked to intercept all this raw material of the mines and impress upon it all the labour and skill which human hands could give to it. ”

“ The living Present that overshadows him is a great and solemn vitality, whose breath and pulse he feels all alive and stirring upon him. And, what is more, and the special thought that touches him, this breath and pulse have the glow and throb of twenty successive human generations. Through all these long ages they have breathed and beat without a break. Here is this grand old church, built and baptised by that fair-haired, blue-eyed, good-hearted Saxon woman. ”

“ The hill-top of the Wrekin overlooking this buried Roman city, and elevated 1,300 feet above the sea, is not only a grand point of observation but of reflection, commanding landscapes of wonderful extent and variety and scenes of historical interest dotting, like diversely-tinted fields, the checkered expanse of eighteen centuries. As the eye passes from one feature to another of the great valley, so the mind passes from scene to scene and fact to fact in the histories of the land that have been enacted in that space. ”

“ The Wrekin is not only a remarkable eminence for the eye but also for the ear; especially just as the sun is sinking to the rim of the horizon. From all hills, both great and small, voices, that would not be heard at noon, come up to you as if the lower skies exhaled them, as they do the earth's invisible vapours. ”

“ She is the man and master of the house. She permeates it with her rayful presence, and fills it with a pleasant morning in foggy and blue-spirited days. She it is who greets the coming and speeds the parting guest with a grace which suns, with equal light and warmth, both remembrance and anticipation. ”

“ It is the parlor pier-glass of the present century. It reflects the two images in vivid apposition—the brilliant civilization of this last, unfinished age in which we live and the life of bygone centuries; that is, if Haddon Hall shows its face in it, or if you have the features of that antiquity before your eyes when you look into the Chatsworth mirror. ”

“ In a moment you are above thickly-thronged streets, and the houses on either side, looking down into the black throats of smoky chimneys; into the garret lairs of poverty, sickness, and sin; down lower upon squads of children trying to play in back-yards eight feet square. It is all wrong, except in the single quality of speed. ”

“ The trees in hedge-row, copse, and grove seem to thank heaven out of the whispering lips of all their leaves that they can breathe its pure air and drink in the life of its blessed sun, with no black, despotic chimneys to molest or make them afraid. ”