A. Mary F. Robinson

“ For these saintly visions are all of love—love which ravishes; nay, love which drowns, annihilates, swallows up. Love in a dream, and yet the one real thing in a cramped and narrow life; love which fills every interstice and cranny of a 45void and aching heart; love unseen, untouched, unheard, for which the visionary waits hour by hour, in an anguish of tense devotion, waits till the muttered monotony of her prayers, the fixed, unvaried straining of her eyes, shall have lulled the body to a death-like trance, shall set free the soul to show her the mirage of her own unsatisfied desire. ”

“ The cataract grew month by month, a thickening veil that blotted out the world; and month by month the old blind man sat wearily thinking through the day of his dear son's ruin, for he had ever loved Branwell the best, and lay at night listening for his footsteps; while below, alone, his daughter watched as wearily for the prodigal's return.
The three girls looked on and longed to help. All that they could do they did, Charlotte being her father's constant helper and companion; but all they could do was little. They would not reconcile themselves to see him sink into blindness. ”

“ At last the blackberries shine in the hedges, the whortleberry on the hills. Now comes the last flower of all, the pale veilleuse, or lilac colchicum, springing in myriads in the aftermath and orchard-grass, although, on the heights, a few stunted scabious, wild pinks, and gentians may linger until Martinmas. Chill October is at hand. Already, a fortnight ago, one stormy afternoon, I watched the swallows gather in the clouds. The time of flowers is over.
To us, the beautiful blossoms are a mere delight. To the mountain shepherds, the gentian gathering is a fruitful, unsown harvest. ”

“ The sun dries the dew from the grass, and lends a grace even to the faded almond flowers; the sun shining on a pane of glass or the soapy water in a tub makes of them a glory; the sun turns the sunflower westward in his course, and makes the tin cock on the church tower a dazzling chanticleer; the sun shining through the boughs of the lime-walk sheds on the gravel trembling pools of light which wobble so lovely that one scarcely dares to walk there; the sun makes a banner of the clout that dries on the hedge; and gilds with a wonderful lustre the varnished earthenware crock in the farm-yard ”

“ But the real life, the only beauty of the country, is set on the top of all the hills, where moor joins moor from Yorkshire into Lancashire, a coiled chain of wild free places. White with snow in winter, black at midsummer, it is only when spring dapples the dark heather-stems with the vivid green of the sprouting wortleberry bushes, only when in early autumn the moors are one humming mass of fragrant purple, that any beauty of tint lights up the scene. But there is always a charm in the moors for hardy and solitary spirits. ”

“ If to-day we see religion mask itself as devotion to humanity, it is but the reversal of the great masquerade of the Middle Ages, when whatever impulse of good-will to man was destined to survive assumed for safety’s sake the garb of the Church. Benevolence, science, logic, philosophy, and all the arts put on the hood and cowl. And the time came when love also entered religion. Indeed, the convent was the one safe place of refuge in a struggling, dark, chaotic world—a world for which centuries of careful nurture had ill-fitted the sentiment of love. ”

“ From earliest June till mid-July or later, before the hay is cut, our fields are as full of flowers as any Paradise of Fra Angelico’s. Nowhere have I seen plants so robust and brilliant, blossom of all sorts so abundant. In the water-meadows, the forget-me-not grows in high bright patches among the ox-eye daisies; the meadow-sweet is tall along the runnel’s edge among the flowering mint and willowherb; the loose-strife springs crimson in the hollows; the columbine stands high and blue in every hedge; on the heights the fox-glove hangs its blood-red bells from every rock or bank ”

“ Such natures need the liberty, the solitude, the rapt interminable progression, and ideal refuge of the inner life. A sort of disgust of reality seizes them at the very moment when the earthly paradise they dreamed of appears, at last, within their reach. Alissa has only to stretch out her hand in order to take her happiness. After all, is it worth while? The dread of disenchantment, the sense of mortal imperfection, paralyse her. The dawn of love is surely its most delicate, delicious moment; the high day of noon can never improve upon that exquisite suggestion. ”

“ He was quick to take an advantage, long-suffering, sly, nursing his revenge in silence like a vindictive slave, until at last the moment of retribution should be his; sufficiently truthful and brave to have grown noble in another atmosphere, but with a ready bent to underhand and brooding vengeance. Insensible, it seemed, to gratitude. Proud with the unreasoning pride of an Oriental; cruel, and violently passionate. One soft and tender speck there was in this dark and sullen heart; it was an exceedingly great and forbearing love for the sweet, saucy, naughty Catharine. ”

“ Many never return; some after years—ten, fifteen, twenty years—come home again, tanned and grey—swearing troopers, whose talk is all of battle, whose camp jests and lewd stories fall like filth into the pure fountain of a woman’s soul. What knight is this for a delicate lady to love! She must change the very nature of her love if this shall satisfy her heart. The frail ideal, nourished so long with care and patience, must die, so it seems. ”

“ A sudden turn of the road reveals the picturesque village, scattered over several roundly swelling hills, but clustered thickliest round an abrupt and wooded cliff, steeper than the others, and surmounted by a huge mediæval fortress, one frown of battlements, turrets, and watch-towers behind its tremendous walls. Below the castle and the rock, and in the depth of the valley, lies a tiny lake, quite round, girdled with quinconces and alleys of clipped lime. Far away, beyond the hills, on every side, the deep-blue forest hems us in. ”

“ To Claudel, movement, life, are but a transient wave-and-wobble on the surface of Reality, un tremblement essentiel devant la face du Saint.’ Behind the streaming veil he discerns the Eternal Face within, ever serenely smiling. Behind Life there is that which Life is not: there is the living God. Hidden by the mists of our apparent disorder, he divines a crystal sphere—an indivisible, unalterable, absolute Existence—where right is always right, where wrong is always wrong, to all eternity. ”

“ Brontë was in bed, when Anne and Charlotte had gone upstairs to their room, Emily still sat up, waiting. She often had very long to wait in the silent house before the staggering tread, the muttered oath, the fumbling hand at the door, bade her rouse herself from her sad thoughts and rise to let in the prodigal, and lead him in safety to his rest. But she never wearied in her kindness. In that silent home, it was the silent Emily who had ever a cheering word for Branwell; it was Emily who still remembered that he was her brother, without that remembrance freezing her heart to numbness. ”

“ How can the spirit of man, deprived of virtue, cognition, will, personality and life, remain immortal? Still more, how can he enjoy such immortality? The dim feeling of such eternal rest we all can understand, who have gone suddenly from a lighted room into the vast night, and have felt our souls suddenly invaded and possessed by a sense of mystery and silence. We have felt this; but in his final beatitude the Mystic must not feel: “He must be as one dead.” ”

“ Here the towns are set as close together as the jewels in a crown. We have scarcely left Orange before we see, beyond the green belt of the Rhone, the mediæval outline of the Palace of the Popes. L’Ile Sonnante, as Rabelais called it, rises out of the plain and the water like an island indeed, much as our own little Rye stands up out of the Sussex marshes. With its steeples and convents, its towers and buttresses, massed round the tremendous fortress on the central rock, girdled by an outer circle of crenelated ramparts, this fair town of Avignon appears the very sanctuary of the Middle Ages. ”

“ They show us a woman of passionate and eager temperament, a soul of suffering ardour, fevered with a sort of avid languor, of fierce tenderness whose cold fit is a sudden revolt of indifference or pride: a woman who reminds us sometimes of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse and sometimes of Phædra! Need we say that this self-centred and sensual being is unhappy? Yet she is full of poetry, of passion, of charm, half a spoiled child, half an inspired Muse. But she seeks in sentiment and in sensation an Absolute which does not exist on earth. ”

“ Every tie, indeed, united to detain Gregory in Provence. He was no ascetic, indifferent to glory or to comfort; but an affectionate, natural man, loving his ease, loving his family, loving the land where he was born. At Avignon he dwelt among his friends, his kinsmen, his father the Comte de Beaufort, his mother, his four sisters. The stories of his Cardinals could only add to his own horror of that distant Italy whose language he could not speak. He was ill, and he dreaded the miasma of Rome; he needed the comforts of that Court whose luxurious memory should long survive in France. ”

“ If I had been a man, I would, I think, have been a forester; not a woodman, but an inspector of woods and waters, like Jean de la Fontaine, riding all day long under the green and musical covert, among the fresh scents of herb and leaf and resin, sleeping at night in the forest-warden’s lodge, deciding the destinies of oak and beech and pine. ”

“ Liberty was the breath of Emily's nostrils; without it she perished. The change from her own home to a school, and from her own very noiseless, very secluded, but unrestricted and unartificial mode of life to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindest auspices) was what she failed in enduring. Her nature was here too strong for her fortitude. Every morning, when she woke, the visions of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. ”

“ Ysé is alone in her white tea-gown, her yellow hair loosely plaited for the night; a babe sleeps in its cradle; but without rages the thunder of cannon with the shrieks of a pillaged city, sacked by fanatics. The Boxers in revolt are ravaging the Concession; this sole building, the strongest, still holds out against them.
To Ysé, anxiously watching, enters her protector; and, oh, most dramatic surprise!—it is not Mesa; it is Amalric! And yet we learn the child is Mesa’s. The man of action has carried off the love and the son of the dreamer: all the profits of life are for him. ”

“ All over Europe spread darkness and confusion: Rome was paralysed, France crazed with superstition and communistic panic, Italy a mere disorganised prey for the next comer; and Germany, most piteous of all, with the convert’s earnestness and the loyalty of a serf, not yet fit for the sudden withdrawal of the hierarchy and the feudalism to which she clung for support, Germany reeled heavily. It seemed that the end of the world was at hand; and truly, in this terrible interregnum, the whole fabric of the Middle Ages began to crack and gape in ominous ruin. ”

“ Every one who has been to a fancy ball recalls the charming coiffure which surmounts this costume—the thick wavy black tresses, parted in the middle of the brow, taken down either side of the face loosely, then suddenly raised from the nape of the neck high at the back of the head, coiled round there and fixed under a tiny band of white lace, and a large bow or sash of black ribbon. Few head-dresses are at once so irresistible and so dignified, and none could be better suited to the regular features, ample beauty, and melting eyes of the daughters of Provence. ”

“ That purity as of polished steel, as cold and harder than ice, that freedom in dealing with love and hate, as audacious as an infant's love for the bright flame of fire, could only belong to one whose intensity of genius was rivalled by the narrowness of her experience—an experience limited not only by circumstances, but by a nature impervious to any fierier sentiment than the natural love of home and her own people, beginning before remembrance and as unconscious as breathing. ”

“ The Countess de Noailles is really a great poet—the greatest that the Twentieth Century has as yet produced in France, perhaps in Europe. In her the romantic Nineteenth Century has its last echo: her ardent magnificence, her sense of the wild beauty of natural things, her lyric cries, her vast horizons magically evoked, her summits and her tempests, and then her sudden bursts of simple, friendly homeliness, recall the genius of Victor Hugo. ”

“ How I love the jay! Its harsh gay laughter seems to me an integral part of spring—as much so as the sunny winds of March. No bird is so handsome. I have a friendship for its fierce, bold eye, its short, proud head of a winy grey, its breast and pinions so blue, spotted with black, with penfeathers of black and dazzling white. No creature seems more wild, and none, in fact, is easier to tame. This very summer I tried to rear a nestling which a wanton shepherd took. ”

“ Patrick Branwell was the favourite with his aunt, the naughty, clever, brilliant, rebellious, affectionate Patrick. Next to him she always preferred the pretty, gentle baby Anne, with her sweet, clinging ways, her ready submission, her large blue eyes and clear pink-and-white complexion. Charlotte, impulsive, obstinate and plain, the rugged, dogged Emily, were not framed to be favourites with her. Many a fierce tussle of wills, many a grim listening to over-frivolous reminiscence, must have shown the aunt and her nieces the difference of their natures. ”

“ Denise Cayrol is a noble creature, strong, kind, and pure. At twenty-seven years of age she no longer thinks of herself as a young girl; she is not concerned with love and marriage, and it is rather with a half-maternal, half-sisterly devotion that she tends the young consumptive, a few years younger than herself, who is so eager to live, so ardent in loving, and whom her clear, reasonable judgment and pitiful heart see from the first as marked with the signs of his doom. ”