North and South were equally confident that God was on their side, and appealed incessantly to Him.
— Rebecca Harding Davis
No man surely has so short a memory as the American.
The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute.
Crime, to the man of the forties, was an alien monstrous terror.
You will find the poet who wrings the heart of the world, or the foremost captain of his time, driving a bargain or paring a potato, just as you would do.
It was part of your religion to hate the British.
It has happened to me to meet many of the men of my day whom the world agreed to call great.
Reform is born of need, not pity.
Our young people have come to look upon war as a kind of beneficent deity, which not only adds to the national honor but uplifts a nation and develops patriotism and courage.
The only hero known to my childhood was Henry Clay.
It is a good rule never to see or talk to the man whose words have wrung your heart, or helped it, just as it is wise not to look down too closely at the luminous glow which sometimes shines on your path on a summer night, if you would not see the ugly worm below.
But, after all, we are a young nation, and vanity is a fault of youth.
Sitting by the chimney corner as we grow old, the commonest things around us take on live meanings and hint at the difference between these driving times and the calm, slow moving days when we were young.
You were only truly patriotic if you had a laborer for a grandfather and were glad of it.
Our village was built on the Ohio River, and was a halting place on this great national road, then the only avenue of traffic between the South and the North.
I went to Concord, a young woman from the backwoods, firm in belief that Emerson was the first of living men. He was the modern Moses who had talked with God apart and could interpret Him to us.
The sun, the earth, love, friends, our very breath are parts of the banquet.
But remember, I am no politician, and no seer into souls.
We don't often look into these unpleasant details of our great struggle. We all prefer to think that every man who wore the blue or gray was a Philip Sidney at heart.
We have grown used to money. The handling, the increase of it, is the chief business of life now with most of us.
America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.
War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums.
Every child was taught from his cradle that money was Mammon, the chief agent of the flesh and the devil.
TO preach a sermon or edit a newspaper were the two things in life which I always felt I could do with credit to myself and benefit to the world, if I only had the chance.
For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread.
