William Huskisson

“ Guizot and Normanby are on civil terms, and that is all. When they meet on business they discuss the particular matter in hand, and never anything more; to William Hervey Guizot does not speak at all; when they meet at Madame de Lievens, Guizot appears not to see him. She says that I am the only Englishman to whom he can talk openly, and consequently they are very sorry for my departure. ”

“ When twenty-two senators, including Jeremiah Mason, Christopher Gore, Samuel Dana, Rufus King, and William B. Giles, declared that a minister resident in Sweden was inexpedient in the summer of 1813, they declared what every other well-informed man knew to be an error. If any American envoy was ever expedient, it was64 an envoy to Sweden in 1813; for in Sweden at that moment all that was left of American commerce centred after being driven from England, and the political interests of Sweden were greatly involved with those of the United States. ”

“ At the age of sixteen Wilson was apprenticed to a hat manufacturer at Hawick, but he still pursued far into the night the practice of reading and study. After a short time his father purchased the business for him and an elder brother named William. The two young men prospered in their undertaking, and their native town proved too small for their energies. In 1824 they removed to London, and commenced business with a partner, the firm being known as Wilson, Irwin, & Wilson. ”

“ He next opened a school at Bloomfield, New Jersey, where he remained till early in 1802, when he received an appointment from the trustees of the Union school, close to Gray's Ferry, near Philadelphia. Here he made the acquaintance of William Bartram, the botanist and naturalist, who owned an extensive garden on the west bank of the Schuylkill, where Wilson was able to gratify to the full his love of nature. His friends, becoming anxious for his health, persuaded him to relinquish poetry for drawing, and he took lessons from the engraver, Alexander Lawson. ”

“ There they march, warm-blooded champions of a better day for man. There on horseback, among them, in his very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune, upon whose happy youth every divinity had smiled. ”

“ The only good that I can see in the demonstration of the 'Truth of Spiritualism' is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing-sweeper, than die and be made to talk twaddle by a 'medium' hired at a guinea a Seance." [2]
Obviously the mind of the excellent Huxley has here but two whole-souled categories namely revelation or imposture, to apperceive the case by. Sentimental reasons bar revelation out, for the messages, he thinks, are not romantic enough for that; fraud exists anyhow; therefore the whole thing is nothing but imposture. ”

“ The doctor was Sir William Watson, an amateur astronomer and all-round scientist, and member of the Royal Society of London.
Herschel had held himself high—he had not gossiped of his work with the populace, cheapening his thought by diluting it for cheap people. Watson saw that Herschel, working alone, isolated, had surpassed the schools.
There is a nugget of wisdom in Ibsen's remark, "The strongest man is he who stands alone," and Kipling's paraphrase, "He travels the fastest who travels alone." ”

“ As when Eckhart tells of the still desert of the Godhead, "where never was seen difference, neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost, where there is no one at home, yet where the spark of the soul is more at peace than in itself." ”

“ Her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as in a mighty mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens, the clouds and snow-fields combine them into white, the woods and flowers disperse them into colors. Polarization, interference, absorption, awaken sensibilities in matter of which our senses are too coarse to take any note. ”

“ I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you; None have understood you, but I understand you; None have done justice to you—you have not done justice to yourself; None but have found you imperfect—I only find no imperfection in you. ”

“ See the ignoble crew that escorts every great pugilist—parasites who feel as if the glory of his brutality rubbed off upon them, and whose darling hope, from day to day, is to arrange some set-to of which they may share the rapture without enduring the pains! ”

“ In the same act by which I feel that this passing minute is a new pulse of my life, I feel that the old life continues into it, and the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a novelty. ”

“ Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. ”

“ Think of her beauty—a shining ball, sky-blue and sun-lit over one half, the other bathed in starry night, reflecting the heavens from all her waters, myriads of lights and shadows in the folds of her mountains and windings of her valleys, she would be a spectacle of rainbow glory, could one only see her from afar as we see parts of her from her own mountain-tops. ”

“ So long as Knut and Sunnanväder were protected by Fredrik's officers in Norway, the Danish monarch's assurances of friendship carried little weight. Gustavus seems not to have appealed to Fredrik in this matter till every effort to persuade the Danish officers in Norway had been tried. He wrote even to the Norwegian Cabinet, and begged them to keep the promises made to him in Malmö. While in the midst of these entreaties, a letter came from Fredrik asking for the release of certain prisoners, among them Norby's daughter, whom Gustavus had captured in the war with Norby. ”

“ Where the hills furnish a dark background the old tree stands out, weird and majestic, its limbs white and naked after shedding their cinnamon-like bark. It glistens in the sunlight almost as much as the ice-prisms. The high water is busy undermining the bank of the stream and an occasional cave-in appears, as though some muskrat surprised in his foraging were making a hasty departure for his tunnelled home. ”

“ Can we gain no anticipatory assurance that what is to come will have no strangeness? Is there no substitute, in short, for life but the living itself in all its long-drawn weary length and breadth and thickness? ”

“ Sweden in the early part of the sixteenth century was not fertile in literary men. Gustavus himself, judged by any rational standard, was an abominable writer. His despatches are in number almost endless and in length appalling. Page after page he runs on, seemingly with no other object than to use up time. Often a document covers four folios, which might easily have been compressed into a single sentence. Such was the habit of the age. A simple letter from a man to his wife consisted mainly of a mass of stereotyped expressions of respect. ”

“ Thy people,... when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours,—the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present. ”

“ Onward they move together, a single resolution kindled in their eyes, and animating their otherwise so different frames. The bronze that makes their memory eternal betrays the very soul and secret of those awful years. ”

“ The peace and rest, the security desiderated at such moments is security against the bewildering accidents of so much finite experience. Nirvana means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the world of sense consists. ”

“ I am a new man since I have been here, both from the ruddy hues of health which mantle on my back, and from the influence of this live city on my spirits. Dresden was a place in which it always seemed afternoon ”

“ The parting with my wife and my poor children hath often been to me as the pulling of my flesh from my bones, especially my poor blind child who lay nearer my heart than all I had besides. Poor child, thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in this world! ”

“ And those of sanguine temperament, when their spirits are high, find it impossible to give any permanence to evil forebodings or to gloomy thoughts. In an instant the train of association dances off to flowers and sunshine, and images of spring and hope. ”

“ You never saw such a mania for going deep into the bowels of truth, with such an absolute lack of intuition and perception of the skin thereof. To hear the grass grow from morn till night is their happy occupation. ”

“ With no more apparatus than an evil-smelling lantern, I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands,—seeking for that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. ”

“ We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. ”

“ The sudden emergence from darkness to light seemed to fill the very soul of the caged bird with gladness, and even before we could conceal ourselves behind the blind it would break forth into the sweetest melodies, filling the woods with its songs, as though once again free in its erstwhile haunts. ”

“ Green would be the dominant color, but the blue atmosphere and the clouds would enfold her as a bride is shrouded in her veil—a veil the vapory transparent folds of which the earth, through her ministers the winds, never tires of laying and folding about herself anew. ”

“ Does not the admission of such an unguaranteed chance or freedom preclude utterly the notion of a Providence governing the world? Does it not leave the fate of the universe at the mercy of the chance-possibilities, and so far insecure? Does it not, in short, deny the craving of our nature for an ultimate peace behind all tempests, for a blue zenith above all clouds? ”

“ But of late years the terrace has been overrun by romantic improvers, and to pass to their work is like going from classic to gothic architecture, where few outlines are pure and where uncouth forms lurk in the shadows. ”

“ I find everything good and pleasant, even my tears, my grief. I enjoy weeping, I enjoy my despair. I enjoy being exasperated and sad. I feel as if these were so many diversions, and I love life in spite of them all. ”

“ There are the heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope and help a thousand times than in this dead level and quintessence of every mediocrity. ”

“ My Father, although half suffocated by the emotion of being lifted, as it were, on the great biological wave, never dreamed of letting go his clutch of the ancient tradition, but hung there, strained and buffeted. It is extraordinary that he—an 'honest hodman of science', as Huxley once called him—should not have been content to allow others, whose horizons were wider than his could be, to pursue those purely intellectual surveys for which he had no species of aptitude. ”

“ As they lay there in the evening twilight, hungry and wet, against the cold sands of Morris Island, with the sea-fog drifting over them, their eyes fixed on the huge bulk of the fortress looming darkly three-quarters of a mile ahead against the sky, and their hearts beating in expectation of the word that was to bring them to their feet and launch them on their desperate charge, neither officers nor men could have been in any holiday mood of contemplation. ”

“ What a man is engraves itself upon him in letters of light. Concealment avails him nothing, boasting nothing. There is confession in the glances of our eyes; in our smiles; in salutations; and the grasp of hands. ”

“ What a grotesque being I am, to be sure, lying in this room, with the resistance of a thistle-down, having illusory moments of throbbing with the pulse of the race, the mystery to be solved at the next breath, and the fountain of all happiness within me—the sense of vitality, in short, simply proportionate to the excess of weakness. ”

“ The customs of Heaven ought surely to be more sacred in our eyes than its anomalies; the dear old ways, of which the Most High is never tired, than the strange things which he does not love well enough ever to repeat. ”

“ These immense meadows—these interminable rivers—you are immense and interminable as they; You are he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution. ”

“ Can you pass from one to another, keeping always in your one universe without any danger of falling out? In other words, do the parts of our universe HANG together, instead of being like detached grains of sand? ”

“ What greets our eyes is what we know best, most deeply understand; because we ourselves have felt it and lived through it. We know what has ploughed these furrows, deepened these shadows, blanched this hair ”

“ His hypothesis goes to this—to make the common run of his readers fancy they can do all that can be done by genius, and to make the man of genius believe he can only do what is to be done by mechanical rules and systematic industry. This is not a very feasible scheme; nor is Sir Joshua sufficiently clear and explicit in his reasoning in support of it. ”

“ The truth is, the Swedish people were so used to insurrection that the slightest disappointment sufficed to set the whole country by the ears, and no sooner was the expedition brought to its humiliating end than the people began to look about for pretexts for revolt. One of the first cries raised against Gustavus was that he had transgressed the law by admitting foreign citizens into the Cabinet of Sweden. ”