“Home can never be transferred; never repeated in the experience of an individual. The place consecrated by parental love, by the innocence and sports of childhood, by the first acquaintance with nature; by the linking of the heart to the visible creation, is the only home. There there is a living and breathing spirit infused into nature: every familiar object has a history—the trees have tongues, and the very air is vocal."
Fletcher is concerned with the nature of home. Having lost the opportunity to marry the woman whom he truly loved, he worries that this longing for her as family which he experienced can never be replicated. He compares this yearning to the nostalgia and intimacy with which one remembers a childhood home. Every detail of the place is ingrained in the memory, manifesting in a sense of calm reassurance.
"Marriage is not essential to the contentment, the dignity, or the happiness of woman."
Sedgwick writes in contradiction to the cultural beliefs of Fletcher's day. She desires her readers to thoroughly understand that to be unmarried is barely different for a woman. Her fulfillment doesn't reside in her husband, nor in the management of the home.
"There are time when every true subject has his price."
Fletcher wants to marry Alice so badly that he is willing to bribe her future husband out of marrying her. He is inconsolable, but in this desperation he reveals a crucial detail concerning his psychology. Fletcher believes in the capitalist system so fervently that he doesn't consider true loyalty possible. In this quotation he reveals a sort of "everyman" adherence to the relationship between conviction and temptation.
". . .The present indifference of the English and the Indians, is but a vapour that has, even now, nearly passed away."
Everell is a prophet for his time. He notices the subtle shifts in association between the English and the Native Americans, identifying the prospect of harmony. In his esteem, it's only a matter of time before people set their cultural differences aside in recognition of solidarity, almost in an iconoclastic rejection of the past.
