"Nobody, I think, who has seen that eastern shore of Sicily can have escaped without some strong impression from it. The Fourrierites, you know, pretend to believe that the earth is a living being, with a soul, only a larger one, like ours that creep on the outside of it. One is sometimes tempted to adopt their idea, and fancy that the changing face of nature is the expression of the earth's thoughts, and its way of communicating with us."
"A landscape will sometimes have a life and a language,—that is, when one happens to be in the mood to hear it,—and yet, after all, association is commonly the main source of its power. The Hudson, I imagine, can match the Rhine in point of mere beauty; but a few ruined castles, with the memories about them, turn the tables dead against us."
"You have always—have you not?—had a penchant for the barbarism of the middle ages."
"Not for their barbarism, but for the germs of civilization that lay in the midst of it. Religion towards God, devotion towards women—these were the vital ideas of the middle ages."
"But how were those ideas acted on? Their religion was not much better than a mass of superstitions."
"Not more gross and vulgar than the spirit rapping superstition, the last freak into which this age of reason has stumbled. And, for the other idea, the fundamental idea of chivalry, we are beginning to replace it with woman's rights, Heaven deliver us!"
"Pardon me if I doubt whether ladies in the middle ages were better treated than they are now. The theory was admirable, no doubt, but the practice, if there were any, seems at this distance a little ridiculous."
"Chivalry was like Don Quixote, who stands for it—fantastic and absurd enough on the outside, but noble at the core."
"But you would not imply seriously that you would prefer the age of chivalry to this nineteenth century."
"No, the reign of shopkeepers is better than the reign of cutthroats. But the nineteenth century has no right to abuse the middle ages. The best feature of its civilization is handed down from them. That feeling which found a place in the rough hearts of our northern ancestry, half savages as they were, and gave to their favorite goddess attributes more high and delicate than any with which the Greeks and Romans, at the summit of their refinement, ever invested their Venus; the feeling which afterwards grew into the sentiment of chivalry, and, hand in hand with Christianity, has made our modern civilization what it is,—that is the heritage we owe to the middle ages, and for which we are bound to be grateful to them. It was a flower all the fairer for springing in the midst of darkness and barbarism; and now that we have it in a kinder soil, we can only hope that it is not fast losing its fragrance and brightness."