When daylight comes; comes in the light;
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!
A. H. CLOUGH.
* * * * *
The gravest fish is an oyster,
The gravest bird is an owl,
The gravest beast is a donkey,
And the gravest man is a fool.
SCOTCH PROVERB.
* * * * *
... Fear
No petty customs nor appearances;
But think what others only dreamed about;
And say what others did but think; and do
What others did but say; and glory in
What others dared but do.
PHILIP J. BAILEY (_My Lady_).
* * * * *
The Cynic in society becomes the Pessimist in religion. The large embrace
of sympathy, which fails him as interpreter of human life, will no less
be wanting when he reads the meaning of the universe. The harmony of
the great whole escapes him in his hunt for little discords here and
there. He is blind to the august balance of nature, in his preoccupation
with some creaking show of defect. He misses the comprehensive march of
advancing purpose, because while he himself is in it, he has found some
halting member that seems to lag behind. He picks holes in the universal
order; he winds through its tracks as a detective, and makes scandals
of all that is not to his mind; trusts nothing that he cannot see: and
he sees chiefly the exceptional, the dubious, the harsh. The glory of
the midnight heavens affects him not, for thinking of a shattered planet
or the uninhabitable moon. He makes more of the flood which sweeps the
crop away, than of the perpetual river that feeds it year by year. For
him the purple bloom upon the hills, peering through the young green
woods, does but dress up a stony desert with deceitful beauty; and in the
new birth of summer, he cannot yield himself to the exuberance of glad
existence for wonder why insects tease and nettles sting. Nothing is so
fair, nothing so imposing, as to beguile him into faith and hope.... In
selfish minds the same temper resorts to the pettiest reasons for the
most desolating thoughts: “If God were good, why should I be born with a
club-foot? If the world were justly governed how could my merits be so
long overlooked?”
J. MARTINEAU (_Hours of Thought_, I, 97).
Reverting to this subject later, Martineau says (_Hours of
Thought II._, 354) “Wherever he moves, he empties the space
around him of its purest elements; with his low thought he
roofs it over from the heavenly light and the sweet air; and
then complains of the world as a close-breathed and stifling
place.”
* * * * *
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb’s feathers; and it
seems to me that cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to
others as they have made it for themselves.
GEORGE MEREDITH (_The Egoist_).
* * * * *
And there’s none of them, but would as soon
Criticize the Almighty as not,
And see that the angels kept tune
And watch that the sun and the moon
Did not squander the light they have got.
W. C. SMITH (_Borland Hall_).
* * * * *
Love, that is first and last of all things made,
The light that has the living world for shade,
The spirit that for temporal veil has on
The souls of all men woven in unison,
One fiery raiment with all lives inwrought
And lights of sunny and starry deed and thought ...
Love, that keeps all the choir of lives in chime;
Love, that is blood within the veins of time....
Love, that sounds loud or light in all men’s ears,
Whence all men’s eyes take fire from sparks of tears,
That binds on all men’s feet or chains or wings;
Love, that is root and fruit of terrene things;
Love, that the whole world’s waters shall not drown,
The whole world’s fiery forces not burn down;
Love, that what time his own hands guard his head
The whole world’s wrath and strength shall not strike dead;
Love, that if once his own hands make his grave
The whole world’s pity and sorrow shall not save ...
Love that is fire within thee and light above,
And lives by grace of nothing but of love.
SWINBURNE (_Tristram of Lyonesse_).
* * * * *
My tantalized spirit
Here blandly reposes,
Forgetting, or never
Regretting, its roses.
E. A. POE (_For Annie_).
* * * * *
Now, for myself, when once the wick is crushed,
I ask not where the light is, which is not,
Nor where the music, when the harp is hushed,
Nor where the memory, which is clean forgot.
W. C. SMITH (_Borland Hall_).
* * * * *
Goethe says somewhere there is something in every man for which, if we
only knew it, we would hate him. I would prefer to say that there is
something in every man for which, if we only knew it, we would _love_ him.
R. HODGSON (_Letter_).
* * * * *
For us no shadow on life’s solemn dial
Goes back to give us peace;
There is no resting-place in the stern trial
Until the heart-throbs cease;
We cannot hold Time fast, and bid him bless us,
And not for us the sun,
When shades fall fast, and doubts and woes oppress us,
Stands still in Gibeon.
E. H. SEARS.
* * * * *
Here’s my case. Of old I used to love him
This same unseen friend, before I knew:
Dream there was none like him, none above him,—
Wake to hope and trust my dream was true....
All my days, I’ll go the softlier, sadlier,
For that dream’s sake! How forget the thrill
Through and through me as I thought “The gladlier
Lives my friend because I love him still!”
R. BROWNING (_Fears and Scruples_).
The “Friend” is God. The lines “All my days, I’ll go the
softlier, sadlier, For that dream’s sake,” seem to me very
beautiful. In so few words Browning, with dramatic insight,
expresses the feeling of a Renan or George Eliot after they had
lost their faith in Christianity.
* * * * *
The world is his, who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what
stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by
sufferance—by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already
dealt it its mortal blow....
In proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows
before him and takes his signet and form. Not he is great who can alter
matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the
world who give the colour of their present thought to all nature and all
art.... The great man makes the great thing.... Linnæus makes botany the
most alluring of studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman;
Davy, chemistry; and Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his, who works
in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd
to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the
Atlantic follow the moon.
EMERSON (_The American Scholar_).
* * * * *
Cantat Deo, qui vivit Deo.
(He sings to God, who lives to God.)
AUTHOR NOT TRACED.
Jenny Lind used to say, “I sing to God.”
* * * * *
A CONSERVATIVE
The garden beds I wandered by
One bright and cheerful morn,
When I found a new-fledged butterfly,
A-sitting on a thorn,
A black and crimson butterfly,
All doleful and forlorn.
I thought that life could have no sting
To infant butterflies,
So I gazed on this unhappy thing
With wonder and surprise,
While sadly with his waving wing
He wiped his weeping eyes.
Said I, “What can the matter be?
Why weepest thou so sore,
With garden fair and sunlight free
And flowers in goodly store?”—
But he only turned away from me
And burst into a roar.
Cried he, “My legs are thin and few
Where once I had a swarm!
Soft fuzzy fur—a joy to view—
Once kept my body warm,
Before these flapping wing-things grew,
To hamper and deform!”
At that outrageous bug I shot
The fury of mine eye;
Said I, in scorn all burning hot,
In rage and anger high,
“You ignominious idiot!
Those wings are made to fly!”
“I do not want to fly,” said he,
“I only want to squirm!”
And he dropped his wings dejectedly,
But still his voice was firm:
“I do not want to be a fly!
I want to be a worm!”
O yesterday of unknown lack!
To-day of unknown bliss!
I left my fool in red and black,
The last I saw was this,—
The creature madly climbing back
Into his chrysalis.
CHARLOTTE PERKINS STETSON.
* * * * *
The very fiends weave ropes of sand
Rather than taste pure hell in idleness.
R. BROWNING (_A Forgiveness_).
* * * * *
He had formed several ingenious plans by which he meant to circumvent
people of large fortune and small capacity; but then he never met with
exactly the right people under exactly the right circumstances.... It is
possible to pass a great many bad half-pennies and bad half-crowns, but
I believe there has no instance been known of passing a half-penny or a
half-crown for a sovereign.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Brother Jacob_).
* * * * *
In the old times Death was a feverish sleep,
In which men walked. The other world was cold
And thinly-peopled, so life’s emigrants
Came back to mingle with the crowds of earth:
But now great cities are transplanted thither,
Memphis, and Babylon, and either Thebes,
And Priam’s towery town with its one beech.
The dead are most and merriest: so be sure
There will be no more haunting, till their towns
Are full to the garret; then they’ll shut their gates,
To keep the living out, and perhaps leave
A dead or two between both kingdoms.
T. L. BEDDOES (_Death’s Jest-Book_, III, 3).
This is one of the queer fancies in a curious poem.
* * * * *
Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark and the
romance quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon.
EMERSON (_Essay on Experience_).
* * * * *
De vitiis nostris scalam nobis facimus, si vitia ipsa calcamus.
(We make for ourselves a ladder of our vices, when we tread under foot
the vices themselves.)
ST. AUGUSTINE (_De Ascensione_).
* * * * *
I held it truth, with him who sings
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
TENNYSON (_In Memoriam_).
* * * * *
Saint Augustine! well hast thou said,
That of our vices we can frame
A ladder, if we will but tread
Beneath our feet each deed of shame!
LONGFELLOW (_The Ladder of St. Augustine_).
* * * * *
The trials that beset you,
The sorrows ye endure,
The manifold temptations
That death alone can cure,
What are they but His jewels
Of right celestial worth?
What are they but the ladder
Set up to Heav’n on earth?
J. M. NEALE (_O Happy Band of Pilgrims_).
* * * * *
I can bear it no longer—this diabolical invention of gentility, which
kills natural kindliness and honest friendship. Proper pride, indeed!
Rank and precedence, forsooth! The table of ranks and degrees is a lie,
and should be flung into the fire. Organize rank and precedence! That
was well for the masters of ceremonies of former ages. Come forward, some
great marshal, and organize Equality in society.
THACKERAY (_Book of Snobs_).
* * * * *
Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us;
The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in,
The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us,
We bargain for the graves we lie in;
At the devil’s booth are all things sold,
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold;
For a cap and bells our lives we pay,
Bubbles we buy with a whole soul’s tasking:
’Tis heaven alone that is given away,
’Tis only God may be had for the asking.
J. R. LOWELL (_The Vision of Sir Launfal_).
* * * * *
... The too susceptible Tupman, who, to the wisdom and experience of
maturer years, superadded the enthusiasm and ardour of a boy, in the most
interesting and pardonable of human weaknesses, love. Time and feeding
had expanded that once romantic form; the black silk waistcoat had become
more and more developed; inch by inch had the gold watch-chain beneath it
disappeared from within the range of Tupman’s vision; and gradually had
the capacious chin encroached upon the borders of the white cravat; but
the soul of Tupman had known no change.
CHARLES DICKENS (_Pickwick Papers_).
* * * * *
The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may
survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the _savants_
in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human
personality. And the worst of all this is, that love and friendship
may be the outcome of a certain condition of knowledge; increase the
knowledge, and love and friendship beat their wings and go. Every man’s
road in life is marked by the graves of his personal likings. Intimacy is
frequently the road to indifference; and marriage a parricide.
ALEXANDER SMITH (_The Importance of a Man to Himself_).
* * * * *
I think sometimes how good it were had I some one by me to listen when
I am tempted to read a passage aloud. Yes, but is there any mortal in
the whole world upon whom I could invariably depend for sympathetic
understanding—nay, who would even generally be at one with me in my
appreciation? Such harmony of intelligences is the rarest thing. All
through life we long for it ... and, after all, we learn that the vision
is illusory. To every man is it decreed: Thou shalt live alone.
GEORGE GISSING (_The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_).
* * * * *
ISOLATION
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live _alone_.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.
But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour—
Oh! then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain—
Oh might our marges meet again!
Who ordered, that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?
Who renders vain their deep desire?
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
This fine poem is one of a series called “Switzerland,” which
was written as the result of Arnold’s meeting and falling in
love with a lady at Berne. The poem immediately preceding it in
the series is entitled “Isolation: To Marguerite,” while this
is called “To Marguerite, Continued” but as it is now quoted
separately, it is better entitled “Isolation.”
In the preceding poems the lady has lost her affection while
her lover is still devoted; and this leads to the subject of
our isolation from each other in our inner lives. In the second
verse the poet describes the moments when we most crave for
love, sympathy, and mutual spiritual understanding and union.
For an interesting fact connected with this poem, see next
quotation and note.
* * * * *
(Thackeray has been describing how husband, wife, mother, son—each of the
inmates of a household—is interested in his or her own separate world and
looking at the same things from a different point of view.) How lonely
we are in the world! You and your wife have pressed the same pillow for
forty years and fancy yourselves united: pshaw! does she cry out when
you have the gout, or do you lie awake when she has the tooth-ache?...
As for your wife—O philosophic reader, answer and say, Do you tell _her_
all? Ah, sir, a distinct universe walks about under your hat and under
mine—all things in nature are different to each—the woman we look at has
not the same features, the dish we eat from has not the same taste to the
one and the other—you and I are but a pair of infinite isolations, with
some fellow-islands a little more or less near to us.
THACKERAY (_Pendennis_, ch. XVI).
The similarity between this passage and the preceding poem,
written at about the same time, is very curious. Arnold’s
poem appeared in 1852 but was composed ten years earlier,
while _Pendennis_ was published in monthly parts in 1849-50.
Therefore, neither author would consciously know at the time
what the other had written.
The incident is probably an illustration of the mysterious way
in which minds influence one another and create the spirit of
the particular age. There is, I believe, a Chinese proverb to
the effect that we are more the product of our age than of our
parents. This permeating quality of thought and feeling is,
no doubt, the explanation why the highest art and literature,
though often unappreciated at the time, become ultimately
recognized. It appears not to be sufficiently taken into
account in other directions. For instance, it is repeatedly
stated that Blake, because of the limited circulation of his
poems, exercised _no_ influence on the Romantic Revival—see for
example _The Cambridge History of English Literature_, Vol. XI,
201. Yet we know that his work was known to and appreciated by
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Southey, and Hayley. (Although
little regarded now, Hayley’s fame was then so great that he
was offered and refused the poet-laureateship. He appears to
be the one man who was an intimate friend of both Blake and
Cowper.) While a very long period went by before Blake’s poems
became generally known, their influence may well have been
very great, permeating unconsciously through other minds. See
reference on p. 194 to the similar case of Fitzgerald’s “Omar
Khayyam.”
Even if a poem were read by _only one person_, it might
conceivably influence a generation of authors. Suppose, if that
had been possible, a page of Swinburne’s “Tristram of Lyonesse”
or F. W. H. Myers’ “Implicit Promise” (both quoted elsewhere)
had been read by Pope or Dryden; how the monotonous heroic
couplet of their time might have been transformed!
* * * * *
A child was playing on a summer strand
That fringed the wavelets of a sunny sea;
The mother looked in love. “Now build,” said she,
“Your splendid golden castles where you stand;
But when the wave has beaten all to sand,
You must go home.” “Ah, not so soon,” said he.
And now the night has darkened out his glee,
And sad-eyed Grief has grasped him by the hand.
No more the years shall find him free and wild
And madly merry as a bright brave bird:
For earth has nothing like the home he craves
And pauseless Time is beating bitter waves
On all his palaces. He waits the word
Away beyond the blue, “Come home, my child.”
R. HODGSON, 1879.
An impromptu written when the mother and child incident
happened and not revised.
* * * * *
Humanity is neither a love for the whole human race, nor a love for each
individual of it, but a love for the race, or for the ideal of man, in
each individual. In other and less pedantic words, he who is truly humane
considers every human being _as such_ interesting and important, and
without waiting to criticize each individual specimen, pays in advance
to all alike the tribute of good wishes and sympathy.... If some human
beings are abject and contemptible, if it be incredible to us that they
can have any high dignity or destiny, do we regard them from so great a
height as Christ? Are we likely to be more pained by their faults and
deficiencies than he was? Is our standard higher than his? And yet he
associated by preference with these meanest of the race; no contempt
for them did he ever express, no suspicion that they might be less dear
than the best and wisest to the common Father, no doubt that they were
naturally capable of rising to a moral elevation like his own. There
is nothing of which a man may be prouder than of this; it is the most
hopeful and redeeming fact in history; it is precisely what was wanting
to raise the love of man as man to enthusiasm. An eternal glory has been
shed upon the human race by the love Christ bore to it.
SIR J. R. SEELEY (_Ecce Homo_).
* * * * *
On parent knees, a naked, new-born child,
Weeping thou sat’st while all around thee smiled:
So live, that sinking to thy life’s last sleep
Calm thou mayst smile, while all around thee weep.
SIR WILLIAM JONES (1746-1794) (_From the
Persian_).
* * * * *
Can the earth where the harrow is driven
The sheaf of the furrow foresee?
Or thou guess the harvest for heaven
When iron has entered in thee?
AUTHOR NOT TRACED.
This was quoted by Lord Lytton in an essay on _The Influence of
Love upon Literature and Real Life_.
* * * * *
These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,
Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;
The diver, Omar, plucked them from their bed,
Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.
J. R. LOWELL (_On Omar Khayyam_).
* * * * *
It is hard for us to live up to our own eloquence, and keep pace with our
winged words, while we are treading the solid earth and are liable to
heavy dining.
GEORGE ELIOT (_Daniel Deronda_).
* * * * *
So, then, as darkness had no beginning, neither will it ever have an end.
So, then, is it eternal. The negation of aught else, is its affirmation.
Where the light cannot come, there abideth the darkness. The light doth
but hollow a mine out of the infinite extension of the darkness. And
ever upon the steps of the light treadeth the darkness; yea, springeth
in fountains and wells amidst it, from the secret channels of its mighty
sea. Truly, man is but a passing flame, moving unquietly amid the
surrounding rest of night; without which he yet could not be, and whereof
he is in part compounded.
G. MACDONALD (_Phantastes_).
In the story an ogre is reading this passage from a book.
_Phantastes_ is MacDonald’s finest work.
* * * * *
There, on the fields around,
All men shall till the ground,
Corn shall wave yellow, and bright rivers stream;
Daily, at set of sun,
All, when their work is done,
Shall watch the heavens yearn down and the strange starlight gleam.
R. BUCHANAN (_The City of Man_).
This is the poet’s vision of the city of the future, and will
be interesting to the allotment-holders in English cities
to-day.
* * * * *
Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what’s become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.
R. BROWNING (_A Toccata of Galuppi’s_).
* * * * *
Quand on n’a pas ce que l’on aime,
Il faut aimer ce que l’on a.
(When you have not what you love
You must love what you have.)
THOMAS CORNEILLE (_L’Inconnu_).
* * * * *
At last methought that I had wandered far
In an old wood: fresh-washed in coolest dew
The maiden splendours of the morning star
Shook in the steadfast blue....
At length I saw a lady within call,
Stiller than chiselled marble, standing there;
A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,
And most divinely fair.
...
I turning saw, throned on a flowery rise,
One sitting on a crimson scarf unrolled;
A queen, with swarthy cheeks and bold black eyes,
Brow-bound with burning gold....
“I died a Queen. The Roman soldier found
Me lying dead, my crown about my brows,
A name for ever!—lying robed and crowned,
Worthy a Roman spouse.”
TENNYSON (_A Dream of Fair Women_).
Helen of Troy and Cleopatra—but, as Peacock mentioned in _Gryll
Grange_, Cleopatra was of pure Greek descent and could not have
been a “swarthy” lady.
* * * * *
One pond of water gleams;
... the trees bend
O’er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl.
R. BROWNING (_Pauline_).
* * * * *
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a faery’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sideways would she lean, and sing
A faery’s song.
KEATS (_La Belle Dame sans Merci_).
* * * * *
He put the hawthorn twigs apart,
And yet saw no more wondrous thing
Than seven white swans, who on wide wing
Went circling round, till one by one
They dropped the dewy grass upon.
W. MORRIS (_The Earthly Paradise, the Land
East of the Sun_).
* * * * *
Quoth Christabel.—So let it be!
And, as the lady bade, did she.
Her gentle limbs did she undress
And lay down in her loveliness.
S. T. COLERIDGE (_Christabel_)
The six quotations above are word-pictures (see note p. 85).
* * * * *
It is a mistake into which spiritually-minded men have fallen, that God
is apprehended and known by a special faculty. The fact is that every
faculty is serviceable in this noble work. We reach the Divine through
our aesthetic faculties when our soul is stirred by a grand burst of
music, or by the contemplation of a magnificent landscape. We reach
the Divine through our purely intellectual faculties, when, by true
reasoning, founded on sound observation, we master any great law by which
God governs the world. We reach the Divine through our emotional nature
when pure grief or pure love, holy longing, unselfish hope, righteous
indignation, elevate us above the prosaic level of customary equanimity,
and help us to realize the incomparable beauty of holiness.