Northern peoples

“ Alas! too often those principles which give consistency, individuality, and form to the Northern character, which render it stanch, strong, and seaworthy, which bind it together as with iron, are sucked out, one by one, like the bolts of the ill-fated vessel, and from the miserable loosened fragments is formed that human anomaly, a Northern man with Southern principles. Sir, no such man can speak for the North. ”

“ A Northern imagination, it is true, on which all the beauties and faults of the North have left their impress. He insists, he insists with violence and tenacity, he insists so pitilessly! He is afraid that we haven’t understood. ”

“ Their shadows rest upon a nation, as Ruskin puts it, and absorb and mould the life of a race. “The Northern people, century after century, lived under one or another of the two great powers of the Pine and the Sea, both infinite.... ”

“ If life in the Northern States is a grand epic, a poem full of great teaching, then is that of the Southern States a romance of infinitely-picturesque beauty—yes, even though slavery and sandy deserts exist there. ”

“ THE GENIUS OF THE NORTH
It is true that our Northern nature is lofty and strong. Its characteristics may well awaken deep meditation and emotion. When the Goddess of Song has grown up in these surroundings, her view of life is like that mirrored in our lakes, where, between the dark shadows of mountain and trees on the shore, a light-blue sky looks down. Over this mirror the Northern morning and the Northern day, the Northern evening and the Northern night, rise in a glorious beauty. Our Muse kindles a lofty hero's flame, a lofty seer's flame, and always the flame of a lofty immortality. ”

“ Even with the best class of townsfolk it lacks very much of the depth and breadth and fruitfulness of our Northern life, while with these others it is hardly less materialistic than that of their own mules and horses. ”

“ These ideas and thoughts have become imbedded in the minds of the Northern people so firmly that they will fight to maintain them; will make them temporarily a success, and would make them permanent but for their habit of moving so rapidly in the direction of business and the accumulation of wealth, which prepares the mind to surrender everything to the accomplishment of this single object. The Southern inhabitants are almost entirely descended from impetuous, hot-blooded people. ”

“ Can a Northern man dealing with casual servants, querulous, sensitive, and lodged for a day in a sphere they resent, understand the close relations of the races of the South? Can he comprehend the open-hearted, sympathetic negro, contented in his place, full of gossip and comradeship, the companion of the hunt, the frolic, the furrow, and the home, standing in kindly dependence that is the habit of his blood, and lifting not his eyes beyond the narrow horizon that shuts him in with his neighbors? ”

“ Your North is an evil dream, dark horror, which has saturated your veins with the blood of your mother. Your kindly favour, Sire, invites me ever afresh to your Northern city, which by your wisdom and love you have transformed into a wonderful legend ”

“ North," said I, "''tis distance lends enchantment to the view.' Besides, to get a slave away from a Southerner is worth unspeakably more to the cause of human happiness than to help scores of Northern people." ”

“ More than this, there would be a migration from the North to the South. You do not suppose that those beautiful States, those regions than which earth offers nothing to man more fertile and more lovely, are shunned by the enterprising population of the North because they like the rigours of a Northern winter and the greater changeableness, of the Northern seasons? ”

“ The men of the North, who are right, should be as ready to sacrifice everything as the men of the South, who are wrong; and so also should Northern women. I am proud of the fact that my father is employed and trusted by his government. ”

“ It is the stern genius of the North which drives men back upon their own resources, which makes them slow to perceive, and averse to feel, and which, by rendering them insensible to the single, successive impressions of things, requires their collective and combined force to rouse the imagination violently and unequally. It should be remarked, however, that the early poetry of some of the Eastern nations has even more of that irregularity, wild enthusiasm, and disproportioned grandeur, which has been considered as the distinguishing character of the Northern nations. ”

“ Aside altogether from the broad glimpses it gives of a life whereof we Northern Americans know absolutely nothing, it is a beautiful story, sad in its ending, but free from any tinge of coarseness or sensationalism, pure, sweet, warm with human love and tenderness.—Chicago Times. ”

“ It appeared to me that the natural foundation for a history of arctic voyages was in the first place to make clear the main features in the development of knowledge of the North in early times. By tracing how ideas of the Northern World, appearing first in a dim twilight, change from age to age, how the old myths and creations of the imagination are constantly recurring, sometimes in new shapes, and how new ones are added to them, we have a curious insight into the working of the human mind in its endeavour to subject to itself the world and the universe. ”

“ The Northern race, bold, hardy, intelligent, proud and free, will receive into its embrace the heterogeneous spawn of European civilization, and mold it to its own shape, and prepare it for its own destiny. The Southern people are brave, courteous and gentle, credulous and forbearing—loving friends, chivalrous enemies and good masters, to whose strong and generous hands alone the Almighty would entrust the tutelage of his most helpless and degraded children. ”

“ To this very day the long winters and cool summers, the sombre skies and deep forests, have operated to produce a body of thought and emotion in the North of Europe that differs entirely from that nourished under the clear skies and in the warm winds of Italy and Greece. The mysticism of the Northman, his yearning to be at one with the Ultimate Reality, is foreign to the typical Southern intellect—as foreign as the dim forests, in which the mystical gloom of the Northern imagination arose, are to the fruitful plains in which the sunnier creed of the Southerner had its birth. ”

“ The people of the North have of late years come to understand the South better, and whereas what I have said above would, twenty years ago, have found few sympathisers in any Northern city, I believe that to-day it expresses the opinion of the large majority of Northern men. ”

“ The busy minds of the Northern people were constantly more and more given to trade and traffic, while those of the South turned to the enjoyment of a home life; freed from restraint and care, they practiced the amenities of social life, with honor, truth, and charity to all. ”

“ I was at first a little surprised to find the natives of the North so slow, indolent and improvident. We have an idea that a cold climate is bracing and stimulating—ergo, the further north you go, the more active and energetic you will find the people. ”

“ To understand rationally the events which are transpiring, and to forsee their inevitable issue, it is necessary to examine this element of discord between the Northern and Southern people, to investigate its true nature and extent, and weigh carefully the prospect of its cure. ”

“ In every Northern graveyard slumber the victims of this destroying struggle. Many whom you remember playing as children amidst the clover-blossoms of our Northern fields, sleep under nameless mounds with strange Southern wild-flowers blooming over them. ”

“ All men, all nations, knowingly or unknowingly, are playing into his hands.
19. The fact that Arctic explorers have found no such people at the North Pole—where some theorists have persisted in placing them—does not prove that the "Ten Tribes" have lost their identity. It was tradition, not revelation, that located them at the North Pole. "The north country," "The land of the north," these are the scriptural designations of their unknown abode. All the rest is inference. Those tribes could still be intact, and yet much of their blood be found among the northern nations. ”

“ Since the North was covered with ice till a comparatively recent period, we cannot expect any local differentiation of importance there since that time, but must suppose an immigration to the north and to Scandinavia of already differentiated races, from southern Europe. We may thus suppose that tribes belonging to the parent-races of brachycephalic Celts and Slavs, and dolichocephalic Germans, came in from the south and south-east, and Ugro-Finns and Mongoloid tribes immigrated from the south-east and east. ”

“ While the grand outlines and larger features are Italian, such as Cape, Island, Gulf, the minuter belong to the Northern races, who are closer observers of Nature's nice differences, and who take more delight in a frank, fearless acquaintance and fellowship with out-door objects. Beach, sand, headland, foreland, shelf, reef, breaker, bar, bank, ledge, shoal, spit, sound, race, reach, are words of Northern origin. ”

“ My aim too has been, to disabuse them of a few of the prejudices, which ignorance and misrepresentation have fostered against our Northern brethren. Let any one who thinks I have exaggerated their excellencies, only come among them, and see for himself; bringing to the scrutiny a candid mind, prepared to allow for unavoidable differences.—Indeed our people ought to travel northward oftener. ”

“ I am often made to wish that the Southerners could be relieved of our Northern hostility and its effects upon them, just to see them laboring, as they then would, to correct certain evils which ought to be redressed. ”

“ All writers on pottery observe a great difference between the ware of the North and that of the South. Professor Holmes points to this in more than one place in his writings, and he asks this question: “Is it due to differences in race? Were the Southern tribes as a body more highly endowed than the Northern, or did the currents of migration, representing distinct centres of culture, come from opposite quarters to meet along this line. ”

“ There are scattered facts enough to justify any tale which any public speaker chooses to relate. I confess that my respect for many of our Northern people has not risen, as I see them from this point of view. They ought not to be so easily duped, so ready to believe evil, so quickly carried away by partial representations, and so unwilling to take comprehensive views of such a subject as this. ”

“ To the Northern stranger the aspect and the manners of the city are foreign, but if he remains long enough he is sure to yield to its fascinations, and become a partisan of it. It is not altogether the soft and somewhat enervating and occasionally treacherous climate that beguiles him, but quite as much the easy terms on which life can be lived. ”

“ On this spot, too, we may well wonder why we have abandoned our excellent northern words, Scandinavian Thing and Saxon Moot, in favour of a French expression that only means place where men talk, or a Latin one that refers to no more than their coming together. Honey-tasting sparkling mead has here been brewed through the unnumbered centuries, and we may still drink from ancient horns what our fathers enjoyed when the North was first peopled by Aryan man. ”

“ We saw that to the eyes of the oldest civilisation in history and down through the whole of antiquity, the North lay for the most part concealed in the twilight of legend and myth; here and there genuine information finds its way into literature, but is again effaced. At the beginning of the Middle Ages the dark curtain thickens. ”

“ For at length the time is coming when a healthy Northern sentiment shall make itself felt, where of old it was carefully excluded, and the fresh breeze from the Northern pines shall purify the sickly air. They will pass away, these of the old generation—there will arise better ones to take their place, and all shall be changed. ”

“ Every dollar of Northern money invested in the South gives us a new friend in that section. Every settler among us raises up new witnesses to our fairness, sincerity and loyalty. We shall secure from the North more friendliness and sympathy, more champions and friends, through the influence of our industrial growth, than through political aspiration or achievement. Few men can comprehend—would that I had the time to dwell on this point to-day—how vast has been the development, how swift the growth, and how deep and enduring is laid the basis of even greater growth in the future. ”

“ Nearly half their time is passed in sleep; they are silent in comparison with the natives of the other parts of the world; there is little exuberant gaiety and cheerfulness, but patience, indifference, apathy almost. Aspects of nature which appear to be hostile to man, often develop and bring into play his best energies, but there are others which depress and paralyse his powers. I am convinced that the extreme North, like the Tropics, is unfavourable to the best mental and physical condition of the human race. ”

“ The severely practical Northern mind finds itself in a brain-fog with reference to the Southern Continent. Speculative reasoning regarding new forces of civilization does not appeal to it. It wants the concrete circumstances. ”

“ Our best old families have been doing the North extensively, and come home to us resolved never to go North again. But it is fashionable to go North, and they will break this resolution when spring comes. Mamma, and Julia Matilda have brought home an immense stock of Northern millinery, all paid for with the hardest of Southern money, which papa declares the greatest evil the state suffers under. He has been down in the wilderness for the last ten years, searching in vain for a remedy. The North is the hungry dog at the door, and he will not be kicked away. ”