These Germans seem an odd race, a mixture of clay and spirit - what with their beer-drinking and smoking, and their slow, stolid ways, you would think them perfectly earth; but ethereal fire is all the while working in them, and bursing out in most unexpected jets of poetry and sentiment, like blossoms on a cactus.
Harriet Beecher StoweWe hear often of the distress of the negro servants, on the loss of a kind master; and with good reason, for no creature on God's earth is left more utterly unprotected and desolate than the slave in these circumstances.
Harriet Beecher Stowethe temperaments of children are often as oddly unsuited to parents as if capricious fairies had been filling cradles with changelings.
Harriet Beecher StoweThe longest day must have its close โ the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning. An eternal, inexorable lapse of moments is ever hurrying the day of the evil to an eternal night, and the night of the just to an eternal day.
Harriet Beecher StoweWhat is it that sometimes speaks in the soul so calmly, so clearly, that its earthly time is short? Is it the secret instinct of decaying nature, or the soul's impulsive throb, as immortality draws on? Be what it may, it rested in the heart of Eva, a calm, sweet, prophetic certainty that Heaven was near; calm as the light of sunset, sweet as the bright stillness of autumn, there her little heart reposed, only troubled by sorrow for those who loved her so dearly.
Harriet Beecher Stowe