Hilaire Belloc

“ As the Queen drove through the night, silent as it was, there reached her those noises of a City which never cease, and which to prisoners in transition (to our gagged prison victims to-day as they cross London from one Hell to another) are a sort of gaiety or at least a whiff of other men’s living. These noises were the more alive and the more perpetual in this horrid August dark of ’93 because a last agony was now risen high upon the Revolution; the news had been of defeats, of cities fallen, of Valenciennes itself surrendered: so that the next news might be the last. ”

“ There is but one man who is certainly an origin, but he is not a master. You see an unique and single personality, distinct but without force, founding no school--the grave, abiding, kind but covert face of Charles of Orleans. He, linked to the French Renaissance, is like the figure of a gentle friend playing in some garden with a child whose manners are new and pleasing to him, but of whose great destiny he makes no guess. That child was to be Du Bellay, Brantome, Montaigne a hundred-sided, huge Rabelais, Ronsard. ”

“ But there is a cold river which we must pass in our advance towards nothingness and age. In the passage of that stream we change: and you and I have passed it. There is no more endurance in that young mood of ours than in any other human thing. One always wakes from it at last. One sees what it is. The soul sees and counts with hard eyes the price at which a continuance of such high dreams must be purchased, and the heart has a prevision of the evil that the happy cheat will work as maturity is reached by each of us, and as each of us fully takes on the burden of the world. ”

“ Yet will I turn to thee in thought, O sylvan Dee, in joy, in youth and gladness, as thou then wert; and thou shalt always be to me the river of Paradise, where I will drink of the waters of life freely!
There is hardly anything that shows the short-sightedness or capriciousness of the imagination more than travelling does. With change of place we change our ideas; nay, our opinions and feelings. We can by an effort, indeed, transport ourselves to old and long-forgotten scenes, and then the picture of the mind revives again; but we forget those that we have just left. ”

“ Against the loss of Britain, which had been a Roman province, the Faith, when the smoke of battle cleared off, could discover the astonishing loyalty of Ireland. And over against this exceptional province--Britain--now lost to the Faith, lay an equally exceptional and unique outer part which had never been a Roman province, yet which now remained true to the tradition of Roman men; it balanced the map like a counterweight. The efforts to destroy the Faith in Ireland have exceeded in violence, persistence, and cruelty any persecution in any part or time of the world. They have failed. ”

“ Lord Benthorpe, was at the zenith of his career as a land-owner. All the gifts of fortune seemed to have been showered upon the boy; his youth was leading to a manhood of the most brilliant promise, when, at the age of twenty-two, romance or folly led him into an alliance with a woman hopelessly beneath him in station.
She was the daughter of some local lawyer or other, and so betrayed, in every accent and gesture, the restrictions of her upbringing, as to be incapable of that moulding influence which her father-in-law’s family had hoped to exercise. ”

“ Some little way past the summit, on the first zig-zag down, I passed the Lake of the Dead in its mournful hollow. The mist still enveloped all the ridge-side, and moved like a press of spirits over the frozen water, then--as suddenly as on the much lower Brienzer Grat, and (as on the Brienzer Grat) to the southward and the sun, the clouds lifted and wreathed up backward and were gone, and where there had just been fulness was only an immensity of empty air and a sudden sight of clear hills beyond and of little strange distant things thousands and thousands of feet below. ”

“ It spans a lonely valley in which the bay and the old harbour are forgotten, and it is as enormous as the name of Rome.
It is more like a wall for height and completeness than are any of the huge Roman arches I know. Its height is such that it catches the mind more strongly than does the Pont du Gard, and its completeness such that it arrests the eye more than do the long trails of arches that stretch like rays across the Campagna. It appalls one because it is quite alone, and because the multitude that gave it a meaning has disappeared. ”

“ There is a hill not far from my home whence it is possible to see northward and southward such a stretch of land as is not to be seen from any eminence among those I know in Western Europe. Southward the sea-plain and the sea standing up in a belt of light against the sky, and northward all the weald.
From this summit the eye is disturbed by no great cities of the modern sort, but a dozen at least of those small market towns which are the delight of South England hold the view from point to point, from the pale blue downs of the island over, eastward, to the Kentish hills. ”

“ The Summer dark is but the dawn of day.
The last of sunset grows into the morning,
The morning calls you from the dark away.
The holy mist, the white mist of the morning,
Was wreathing upward on my lonely way.
My way was waiting for your own adorning,
That should complete the broad adornéd day.
Rise up, and do begin the day’s adorning;
The little eastern clouds are dapple-gray,
There will be wind among the leaves to-day;
It is the very promise of the morning.
Lux tua via mea. Your light’s my way:
Oh, do rise up and make it perfect day. ”

“ Yet that exclusion of the populace helped to kill the Monarchy.
At one o’clock a Swedish noble, chancing to be at the Queen’s door, was told the news. He was caught and electrified by it as though he had been of the French blood. He turned to the first woman he met and said: “We have an heir!” Now that woman happened to be Provence’s wife, and the scene—her red anger and her disdain, his bewilderment—were taken up at once into the laughter of the moment. All the world laughed or cried: it was like the excitement of a great victory turning the tide of a disastrous war. ”

“ Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.
Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighbourhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labours, citizens, for me!
My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. ”

“ In its vigour, at least, the Renaissance was a glorious youth--he, Du Bellay, died at thirty-five. Its leap and soaring were taken from the firm platform of strong scholarship--he was a scholar beyond the rest. It fixed special forms--he the French sonnet. It felt the lives of all things running through it as a young man feels them in the spring woods--he gathered in the cup of his verse, and retains for us, the nerve of all that life which is still exultant in the forest beyond his river. ”

“ The long slope of the hills fell away for miles to where, by daylight, would have lain the misty plain of Emilia. The darkness confused the landscape. The silence of the mountains and the awful solemnity of the place lent that vast panorama a sense of the terrible, under the dizzy roof of the stars. Every now and again some animal of the night gave a cry in the undergrowth of the valley, and the great rock of Castel-Nuovo, now close and enormous--bare, rugged, a desert place--added something of doom. ”

“ In a plain of the north, undistinguished by great hills, open to the torment of the sky, the gods had traced an arena wherein were to be fought out the principal battles of a later age.
Spirits lower than the divine, spirits intermediate, have been imagined by men wiser than ourselves to have some power over the world—a power which we might vanquish in a special manner, but still a power. To such conceptions the best races of Europe cling; upon such a soil are grown the legends that tell us most about our dark, and yet enormous, human fate. ”

“ For underneath the general life of Europe, with its splendid epic of great Rome turned Christian, crusading, discovering, furnishing the springs of the Renaissance, and flowering at last materially into this stupendous knowledge of today, the knowledge of all the Arts, the power to construct and to do--underneath all that is the foundation on which Europe is built, the stem from which Europe springs; and that stem is far, far older than any recorded history, and far, far more vital than any of the phenomena which recorded history presents. ”

“ They lunched. They proceeded. And Mr. Petre gazed for a good ten minutes on sodden grasses waving in the wind, tall and dirty stalks and broken palings; the poor abandoned acres of bare land lying there doing nothing, with the enormous wealth of London all around. It was like seeing a hole in the middle of the sea, and wondering why the water did not pour in and flood it; wondering why the huge appetite of London did not snap up such a morsel, why the jostle of London didn’t crowd that vacancy with London once again.
It was an odd ritual, this looking at the nothingness of the Paddenham Site. ”

“ Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,—and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.
English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets—Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included—breathes no quite fresh and in this sense wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilised literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green wood,—her wild man a Robin Hood. ”

“ They drank to the King, the Queen, the Heir; the noise of laughter and of enthusiasm grew, the toasts 219and the cheers were exchanged from the boxes to the stage; the floor of the theatre filled with new-comers—speech and the exhilaration of companionship gained on them and rose. Some there in wine felt now again, like a memory in the blood, the old and passionate French love of the kings. Some, who had come to Versailles secretly determined for the Crown, now at last gave full rein and let the soul gallop to its end. ”

“ I could not understand his songs nor he mine, but there was wine in common between us, and salami and a merry heart, bread which is the bond of all mankind, and that prime solution of ill-ease--I mean the forgetfulness of money.
That was a good drive, an honest drive, a human aspiring drive, a drive of Christians, a glorifying and uplifted drive, a drive worthy of remembrance for ever. The moon has shone on but few like it though she is old; the lake of Bolsena has glittered beneath none like it since the Etruscans here unbended after the solemnities of a triumph. ”

“ And, in between, along the floor of the valley, deep pastures and their silence are bordered by lawns of chalky grass and the small yew trees of the Downs.
The clouds that visit its sky reveal themselves beyond the one great rise, and sail, white and enormous, to the other, and sink beyond that other. But the plains above which they have travelled and the Weald to which they go, the people of the valley cannot see and hardly recall. The wind, when it reaches such fields, is no longer a gale from the salt, but fruitful and soft, an inland breeze ”