Northerner

“ Among the lower classes of the rural and laboring population stoutness and strength often approach to clumsiness. Generally the northerners are taller and have better-shaped features and limbs than the southerners. The blonde complexion prevails only in the north; in central and southern Germany light or dark brown is more frequently found. ”

“ When northerners go to the south to reside, they prove very apt scholars. They soon imbibe the sentiments and disposition of their neighbors, and generally go beyond their teachers. Of the two, they are proverbially the hardest masters. ”

“ The most vehement Northerners in the steamer are Germans, who are going to the States for the first time, or returning there. They have become satisfied, no doubt, by long process of reasoning, that there is some anomaly in the condition of a country which calls itself the land of liberty, and is at the same time the potent palladium of serfdom and human chattelry. ”

“ Striker, are you not glad that you live in a free state, and not where, when you return like a bird to its nest at night, you may find your little one carried off, you know not where, by some man-stealer, you know not whom?—We honor your kind feelings, madam, but you are not aware, probably, what overflowing love and tender pity there is among us Northerners, toward your slaves and their children. We are disinterested, too; for we nearly forget our own black people here at the North, and more especially in Canada, to care for you and your people. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is strange, too, that, when you are in the far north, you do not look towards the south until the north turns an iron hand upon you and refuses the hospitality of food and fire; your eyes are drawn towards the Pole by that charm—deadly and beautiful—for which men have given up three points of the compass, with their pleasures and ease, to seek a grave solitude, broken only by the beat of a musk-ox's hoofs, the long breath of the caribou, or the wild cry of the puma. ”

“ Who that knows the North can ever deny its lure? Wherever you be, it will call and call to you. In the sluggish South you will hear it, will long for the keen tingle of its silver days, the vaster glory of its star-strewn nights. In the city's heart it will come to you till you hunger for its big, clean spaces, its racing rivers, its purple tundras. In the homes of the rich its voice will seek you out, and you will ache for your lonely camp-fire, a sunset splendouring to golden death, the night where the silence clutches and the heavens vomit forth white fire. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ In the north, such a soul would have something restless or savage about it. The daughter of the south, nourished by the fruits of the earth, by the warmth of the sun, by the deliciousness of the air and the sky—as her yearnings lulled to a quiet pensiveness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The present race, a mixture of Angles and Danes, still preserve much which speaks strongly of their northern ancestry; amongst them ye will find the light-brown hair of the north, the strong and burly forms of the north, many a wild superstition, ay, and many a wild name connected with the ancient history of the north and its sublime mythology; the warm heart and the strong heart of the old Danes and Saxons still beats in those regions, and there ye will find, if anywhere, old northern hospitality and kindness of manner, united with energy, perseverance, and dauntless intrepidity ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Who writes the books—the histories, poems, philosophies, works of science, even the sermons and commentaries on the Bible? Still the North. Who sends their children to school and college? The North. Who builds the churches, who founds the Bible societies, Education societies, Missionary societies, the thousand-and-one institutions for making men better and better off? Why the North. In a word, who is it that in seventy years has made the nation great, rich, and famous for her ideas and their success all over the world? The answer is, still the North, the North. ”

“ I think you must come from the north, you are so frank and honest, so sturdy and appetizing. You are stocky and homely like the northern races. Your quality is Saxon. Surely the fiery and impetuous south is not akin to you. Not spices or olives or the sumptuous liquid fruits, but the grass, the snow, the grains, the coolness is akin to you. ”

“ The tree of freedom grows more vigorous amid its granite hills. And as it grows in the Northern States of America, grows it also in our Scandinavian North. But what this North possesses, and which America possesses not, is an antiquity full of song and saga, of glorious prophecy and symbolism, of gods and heroes who gave to Scandinavia so large, so peculiar, so romantic a life. It is this antiquity, its significance for the present time, its life in our scenery, and our every-day life which attracts me once more to my native land, as powerfully as my mother's voice. ”

“ The North has not forgotten, especially the older generation. We have not suffered materially and have become absorbed in new interests, but the heart of the North was wounded as truly as that of the South. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Northmen NORWAY (in the old Norse language Noregr, or Nord-vegr, i.e., the North Way) , according to archæological explorations, appears to have been inhabited long before the historical time. The antiquaries maintain that three populations have inhabited the North: a Mongolian race and a Celtic race, types of which are to be found in the Finns and the Laplanders in the far North, and, finally, a Caucasian race, which immigrated from the South and drove out the Celtic and Laplandic races, and from which the present inhabitants are descended. ”

“ 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 silent, patient, toiling ones were the Conquerors of the Great White Land; the Men of the High North, the Brotherhood of the Arctic Wild. No saga will ever glorify their deeds, no epic make them immortal. Their names will be written in the snows that melt and vanish at the smile of Spring; but in their works will they live, and their indomitable spirit will be as a beacon-light, shining down the dim corridors of Eternity.
I slept at a bunkhouse that night, and next morning I again made a call at the tent within which lay Berna. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And for the North to have lain down like a spaniel, to have given up the land that every child in America is taught, as every child in Britain is taught, to regard as his sacred right and his trust, to have given up the mouths of our own rivers and our mountain citadels without a blow, would have marked the North in all future history as craven and mean. ”

“ Now a very common trait in books of both kinds is the author's fondness for pointing out the differences between the people of the southern part of a particular country and the people living in the northern part. You are familiar with the distinction. The inhabitants of the south are hot-headed, amorous, given to mandolin playing, and lacking in political genius. The people of the north are phlegmatic, practical, averse to love-making, unimaginative, readers of the Bible, and tenacious of their rights. ”

“ Many, of course, believed in the right of the North, and in one or other of these items of sincerity; few, I think, in the right, in the sincerity throughout, and in the success as well. The delusion, that the North, after using up its Irish and German population and its incoming immigrants, would quail before the necessity of hazarding also a large proportion of its own settled Anglo-Saxon population, was extremely prevalent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A Glance at the South.—There is something interesting, as you go through the South at the present time, in watching the progress of events. It is a region, speaking of it as a whole, that strikes the Northern man with many peculiarities. One is, where is the population that made that stern resistance to the Northern arms? The cities are all small; there are no villages; whence came that force that withstood us so many years, and withstood us with such might? And then again, you are struck with many things so different from what we find at the North. ”