A. D. T. Whitney

“ It is what always happens to somebody when Pyramids are built. Madam Mucklegrand herself was, perhaps, only a good deal covered up.
How lovely it was to go down into Orchard Street after that, and take tea with Miss Craydocke! How human and true it seemed,—the friendliness that shone and breathed there, among them all. How kingdom-of-heaven-like the air was, and into what pleasantness of speech it was born!
And then Hazel Ripwinkley came over, like a little spirit from another blessed society, to tell that "the picture-book things were all ready, and that it would take everybody to help." ”

“ Desire Ledwith looked what she was, to-day; a grand, pure woman; a fit woman to stand up beside a man like Christopher Kirkbright, in fair white garments, and say the words that made her his wife. There was a beautiful, sweet majesty in her giving of herself.
She did not disdain rich robes to-day,—she would give herself at her very best, with all generous and gracious outward sign.
She wore a dress of heavy silk, long-trained; the cream-white folds, unspoiled by any frippery of lace, took, as they dropped around her, the shade and convolutions of a lily. ”

“ Miss Henderson's window was around a projection of the rambling, irregular structure, which made the angle wherein the pleasant old doorstone lay.
"May I have your dream, Miss Faith?"
She need not be afraid to tell a simple dream. Any more, at this moment, than when she told it to Glory, that morning, on that very spot. Why did she feel, that if she should speak a syllable of it now, the truth that lay behind it would look out, resistless, through its veil? That she could not so keep down its spirit-meaning, that it should not flash, electric, from her soul to his? ”

“ There was something in Sulie's fair, pale, delicate face, and her upper figure, rising with its own peculiar lithe, easily swayed grace from among the gathered folds of the dress of her favorite dark green color, that reminded—if one thought of it, and Hazel turned the feeling of it into a thought at just this moment—of a beautiful white flower, tenderly and commodiously planted.
"Well, I suppose it's worth while to have a lame girl to sit up in a round chair, and look like a lily in a vase, is it?" ”

“ She had everything pretty about her, this old Miss Craydocke. How many people do, that have not a bit of outward prettiness themselves! Not one cubit to the stature, not one hair white or black, can they add or change; and around them grow the lilies in the glory of Solomon, and a frosted leaf or a mossy twig, that they can pick up from under their feet and bring home from the commonest walk, comes in with them, bearing a brightness and a grace that seems sometimes almost like a satire! ”

“ Count Jane with her stout cleaver knight,
And Betsey with the baker;
And Mary Ann in dreamy light
Beside the candle-maker.
Yet of the six no soul is there,
For all your wakened vision!
In the charmed circle of the Fair
They walk their Fields Elysian!
The work goes on by board and bench,—
Hard tax of human sinning,—
But hearts thro' labor-chinks still wrench
Some joy of their beginning.
In the close limit that confines
Our getting and our giving,
Unless we read between the lines,
What should we do with living? ”

“ Mrs. Argenter would be delighted if he would; and then Mr. Sherrett must come into the conservatory, where a few ragged palm ferns, their great leaves browning and crumbling at the edges,—some daphnes struggling into green tips, having lost their last growth of leaf and dropped all their flower buds, and several calmly enduring orange and lemon trees, gave all the suggestion of foliage that the place afforded, and served, much like the painter's inscription at the bottom of his canvas merely to signify by the scant glimpse through the drawing-room draperies,—"This is a conservatory." ”

“ We dared to look round the house and see what was wearing out. We could replace things—some, at any rate—as well as not; so we had the delight of choosing, and the delight of putting by; it was a delicious perplexity. We all felt like Barbara's bee; and when she said that once she said it for every day, all through the new and happy time.
It was wonderful how little there was, after all, that we did want in any hurry. We thought it over. We did not care to carpet the dining-room; we liked the drugget and the dark wood-margins better. ”

“ Late into the morning of the New Year, Faith slept. Through her half consciousness crept, at last, a feeling of music [Pg 7] that had been wandering in faint echoes among the chambers of her brain all those hours of her suspended life.
Light, and music, and a sense of an unexamined, half-remembered joy, filled her being and embraced her at her waking on this New Year's Day. A moment she lay in a passive, unthinking delight; and then her first, full, and distinct thought shaped itself, as from a sweet and solemn memory:
An impulse of lofty feeling held her in its ecstasy ”

“ There was the beginning of fruit under the leaf with Leslie Goldthwaite; and the fine life-current was setting itself that way with its best impulse and its rarest particles.
The pincushion was well filled with the delicate, bristling, tiny-headed needles, when Miss Craydocke appeared, walking across, under her great brown sun-umbrella, from the hotel.
"If you've nothing else to do, my dears, suppose we go over to the pines together? Where's Miss Jeannie? Wouldn't she like it? All the breeze there is haunts them always."
"I'm always ready for the pines," said Leslie. ”

“ To trace her path of joy along the earth,—
And, as she moves, makes music, silver-shod
"With preparation of the peace" of God,
That holds the key-note of celestial cheer,
And hangs heaven's echoes round her foot-
steps here? ”

“ At this very instant, there is close upon you, Marion Kent, one of those lightning shafts that run continually quivering to and fro about the earth, with their net-work of fire, in this storm of life under which we of to-day are born. All the air is tremulous with quick, converging nerves; concentrating events, bringing each soul, as it were, into a possible focus continually, under the forces that are forging to bear down upon it. ”

“ Roger Armstrong dashed into the little countingroom. Faith lay there, on the floor. At that fearful crash, that rush of suffocating smoke, she had fallen, senseless. He seized her, frantically, in his arms to bear her down.
"Faith! Faith!" he cried, when she neither spoke nor moved. "My darling! Are you hurt? Are you killed? Oh, my God! must there be another?"
Faith did not hear these words, uttered with all the passionate agony of a man who would hold the woman he loves to his heart, and defy for her even death. ”

“ No one heart can be happy, that all hearts may not have a share of it. Rosamond and Kenneth, Dakie and Ruth, cannot live out obviously any sweetness of living, cannot sing any notes of the endless, beautiful score, that Desire Ledwith, and Luclarion Grapp, and Rachel Froke, and Hapsie Craydocke, and old Miss Arabel Waite, do not just as truly get the blessed grace and understanding of; do not catch and feel the perfect and abounding harmony of. Since why? No lip can sound more than its own few syllables of music; no life show more than its own few accidents and incidents and groupings ”

“ You see nothing like it in the lowlands,—nothing like the fire of the maples, the carbuncle-splendor of the oaks, the flash of scarlet sumachs and creepers, the illumination of every kind of little leaf in its own way, upon which the frost touch comes down from those tremendous heights that stand rimy in each morning's sun, trying on white caps that by and by they shall pull down heavily over their brows, till they cloak all their shoulders also in the like sculptured folds, to stand and wait, blind, awful chrysalides, through the long winter of their death and silence. ”

“ House-holds break up after the children are grown, of course; they all settle to something; that is all it comes to—the child-life out of which if they had died and gone away, there would have been wailing and heart-breaking; the loving and tending and watching through cunning ways and helpless prettiness and small knowledge-getting: they turn into men and women, and they go out into the towns, or they get married, even—and nobody thinks, then, that the little children are dead! But they are: they are dead, out of the household, and they never come back to it any more. ”

“ That, through the dreamland, there had been that call and answer.
Faith neither spoke, nor stirred, nor trembled. This supreme moment of her life held her unmoved in its own mightiness.
Roger Armstrong held out both his hands.
"Faith! In the sight of God, I believe you belong to me!"
At that solemn word, of force beyond all claim of a mere mortal love, Faith stretched her hands in answer, and laid them into his, and bowed her head above them. ”

“ Well, Jeannie was a pretty thing to look at, in her delicate blue cambric morning dress, gracefully braided with white, with the fresh rose of recent sleep in her young cheeks, and the gladness of young life in her dark eyes. One might look away from the mountains to look at her; for, after all, the human beauty is the highest. ”

“ But Uncle Titus spoke, slowly; much as if he, too, were speaking out involuntarily, without thought of his auditor. People do so speak, when the deep things are stirred; they speak into the deep that answereth unto itself,—the deep that reacheth through all souls, and all living, whether souls feel into it and know of it or not.
"The real things are inside," he said. "The real world is the inside world. God is not up, nor down, but in the midst."
Then he looked up at Desire.
"What is real of your life is living inside you now. ”

“ Only the poor, pale, worn-out ones, like Emma Hollen, who coughed and breathed short, and could not spend strength even in listening, amidst the conflicting whirr of the feeds and wheels,—and the old, sobered-down, slow ones, like Miss Bree and Miss Proddle, button-holing and gather-sewing for dear life, with their spectacles over their noses, and great bald places showing on the tops of their bent heads,—kept time with silent thoughts to the beat of their treadles and the clip of their needles against the thimble-ends. ”