Henry Morford

“ The sound was like an icy sword-blade thrust into a slumbering and tepid fountain—startling all the water spirits from repose and propriety,—or like Christmas suddenly obtruded, keen and pure, into the sluggish rest of midsummer. Of what the old man mused as his waking thoughts recognized the sound, can never be known—possibly of the wealth which he had garnered and of the broad lands over which that sound went ringing—all his own, but his own in what miserable mockery! Of what Colonel Egbert Crawford thought when the sound smote his ears, is much more certain. ”

“ Only the whilome watcher by a sick bed which might be one of death, at the instant when the crisis of disease was reached and the next minute was to decide between a life of love and usefulness and the drear silence of the grave—only the man who has lifted his faint signal of distress on a drifting wreck at sea, when a sail was in sight, the last crust eaten, and night and storm coming to end all,—only one or the other of these can realize the long agony of such moments and the eternity which can be compressed into the merest fraction of time! ”

“ Far away among the mountains, a hundred and fifty miles distant, the boom of that terrible cannonade was heard, announcing the conflict to loyalist and rebel who had no other means of knowing that it was in progress. At times the firm earth shook with the continued reverberations, as if an earthquake was passing; and combatants even stood still in the very face of the deadliest danger, under a momentary impression that some fearful convulsion of nature must be in progress and that the sinking sun must be going down on the last day of a crumbling earth. ”

“ It is equally sad when a woman is seen kneeling to any other power than that of her God! It seems man's province, given alike by nature and the laws of chivalry, to bend his proud knee in other aspects than that of devotion; and even when he is showing that prostration his eye may be glowing with the conscious pride of the future conqueror; but what except the most abject shame or the most overwhelming sorrow, can be shown when the delicate limb of womanhood kisses the green sod or the floor beneath her tread? ”

“ Then what a change!—like that when the thunder-storm, long gathering but still silent, breaks at once into desolating fury. It seemed as if at one and the same instant the four Union batteries opened, and a terrible concentrating storm of flame and projectiles leaped from the muzzles of twenty-four pieces of artillery and burst upon their centre with devastating effect. In an instant after, the infantry sprung to their feet, and a sheet of fire burst from right to left, one deadly and irresistible shower of lead sweeping through the rebel ranks that had so little expected such a reception. ”

“ A sudden break, opening upon a dark quiet little lake or tarn, was to be seen through the trees to the right; and a quarter of a mile away, hanging sheer over the gulf of more than two thousand feet sweeping down towards the foot of the Cannon—there, with the massive iron face staring full into the moonlight that touched nose and cheek and brow with so strange and doubtful a light that the unpractised eye could not trace the outlines, while the accustomed could see them almost as plainly as in the sunlight—there loomed the awful countenance of the Old Man of the Mountain. ”

“ Men look upon him with a ghostly shudder, and women shrink back from his chilling presence. Not even Freja can thaw away all the ice that has gathered in his veins. He may chastise the robber Ruric from the hills, and sleep once more in the warm embrace of Isoldane; but who knows that at some midnight hour the old curse may not return upon him and the hand he stretches in love and fondness strike death to the hearts that are dearest? Not the same—changed, changed—as is every man who has once yielded to the great temptation of his existence. ”

“ What he was suffering at that moment, with three or four of the most powerful passions known to humanity tearing at his heart-strings at once, none may know who have not passed through the same terrible ordeal which he was then enduring. There were only the fays who may have been playing among the green grass, and the dryads yet lingering among the whispering leaves of the maples, looking in at the end of the piazza upon his face: had they been human eyes, what of wrestling and struggle might they not have seen! ”

“ But there are others who know of nothing more thoroughly pleasant than lounging back easily in the cushioned seat of a railway-carriage, with the one close beside, with one hand in reach at any moment, the one face ready to reply in smiles to the look of pleasure given, and the one head ready to repose upon the shoulder when night comes on or the continued motion of the train brings on drowsiness. ”

“ At the cry he turned instantly, though he could not so suddenly check the course of his horse down the path without danger of throwing him from his feet; and as he looked around, through the olive brown of his cheek a deadly whiteness crept to the skin, and his blood stood still as it had probably never before done since the tide of life first surged through his veins.
It has been the lot of many men to look upon a horror accomplished or so nearly accomplished that any reversal of the decree of fate seemed to be beyond hope. ”

“ But whatever changes might have occurred in personal and national feeling, Tom Leslie felt, as he strolled across the bridge and over Goat Island, on the morning after his arrival, that there had been no change which the human eye could perceive, in the great cataract or its surroundings, since he had looked upon it for the last time before his departure for Europe, when that narrow river supplied the northern boundary of what seemed to be a united and happy nation. Humanity is changing, inconsistent and unreliable: Nature is calm, grand, and verges on the eternal. ”

“ If she has learned to suspect me—I know her brave heart and her proud nature—I shall lose her, the richest, noblest thing on earth, half grasped, to be mourned for as never man yet mourned for woman! Do help me, Elsie! Help me to conceal my shame—to deceive her, yes—God help me!—to deceive her before whom my very soul should be laid bare—so that she will not know me for the miserable wretch and coward that I am! ”

“ The canvas best depicting it would be deprived of all the essentials of a picture, and merely made a chaos of destruction, with here the glint of a gun and there the flash of a sabre; here a momentary view of a black piece of heavy artillery, and there a head, an arm and a leg of one of the combatants; here a puff of smoke, and there a volley of belching flame—but all indistinct, terrible and indescribable. Solid shot, conical shell and spherical case went humming, hurtling and howling through the air, blotting out rebels and slaying loyalists. ”

“ Time is the flatterer of memory, as well as the consoler of grief, and perhaps has no holier office. So it was well that the old men's mental eyes were dim when their physical vision was failing; and when we grow old as they, if the scythe of the destroyer cut us not away long before, may the far-away past be gilded for us as it was for them, by the rosy hue of fading remembrance, until all the asperities, the hard realities, the sharp and salient edges and angles of life, are smoothed and worn away forever! ”

“ When Margaret Hayley, breathing the same air that Horace Townsend had breathed a few days before, and aware that she was doing so, joined to the rapt emotions of the place and the hour, something of the sad glory of human love and grief, stretching out her mental hands to God whose awful majesty stood before her and around her in the great peak lifting itself to heaven, and praying that out of darkness might some day come light, as once it had done on that other and more awful peak of Sinai. ”

“ Nature has no sympathy with bloodshed and but little with suffering; and it is only when a God puts off mortal existence that the earth is racked with the thunders and the earthquakes of Calvary. The birds sing as sweetly and the sun shines as brightly as usual, on the day when we lay in the earth all that was mortal of one dearer to us than sunshine or bird-music; and the moon does not turn red or veil her light, even in the presence of midnight murder. ”