Rebecca Harding Davis

But, after all, we are a young nation, and vanity is a fault of youth.

No man surely has so short a memory as the American.

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.

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.

Every child was taught from his cradle that money was Mammon, the chief agent of the flesh and the devil.

It was part of your religion to hate the British.

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 have grown used to money. The handling, the increase of it, is the chief business of life now with most of us.

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.

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.

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.