James Lane Allen

“ Mind is the arbiter of life; it is the creator and shaper of conditions, and the recipient of its own results. It contains within itself both the power to create illusion and to perceive reality.
Mind is the infallible weaver of destiny; thought is the thread, good and evil deeds are the warp and woof, and the web, woven upon the loom of life, is character. Mind clothes itself in garments of its own making.
Man, as a mental being, possesses all the powers of mind, and is furnished with illimitable choice. He learns by experience, and he can accelerate or retard his experience. ”

“ For the last half of this light-and-shadow month, when the clouds, like schools of changeable lovely creatures, seem to be playing and rushing away through the waters of the sun, life to me has narrowed more and more to the red-bird, who gets tamer and tamer with habit, and to Georgiana, who gets wilder and wilder with happiness. The bird fills the yard with brilliant singing; she fills her room with her low, clear songs, hidden behind the window-curtains, which are now so much oftener and so needlessly closed. I work myself nearly to death in my garden, but she does not open them. ”

“ A graveyard of nuns! O Mother Earth, all-bearing, passion-hearted mother! Thou that sendest love one for another into thy children, from the least to the greatest, as thou givest them life! Thou that livest by their loves and their myriad plightings of troth and myriad marriages! With what inconsolable sorrow must thou receive back upon thy bosom the chaste dust of lorn virgins, whose bosoms thou didst mould for a lover's arms and a babe's slumbers! As marble vestals of the ancient world, buried and lost, they lie, chiselled into a fixed attitude of prayer through the silent centuries. ”

“ His words, the scenes with him in the garden, in the field—his voice, looks, gestures—his anxiety and sympathy—his passionate letter—all were now vividly recalled, that they might be forgotten; and their influence confessed, that it might for ever be renounced. Her conscience stood beside her love as though it were some great fast-growing deadly plant in her heart, with deep-twisted roots and strangling tendrils, each of which to the smallest fibre must be uptorn so that not a germ should be left.
But who can describe the prayer of such a soul? It is easy to ask to be rid of ignoble passions. ”

“ There was the English love of lawns, too, with a low matted green turf and wide-spreading shade-trees above—elm and maple, locust and poplar—the English fondness for a home half hidden with evergreens and creepers and shrubbery, to be approached by a leafy avenue, a secluded gate-way, and a gravelled drive; for highways hardly admit to the heart of rural life in Kentucky, and way-side homes, to be dusted and gazed at by every passer-by, would little accord with the spirit of the people. ”

“ New Year’s day—the winter woods—the journeying throng—the oak—the bough—the banquet beneath—the white bulls with fillets on their horns—the white-robed priest—the golden sickle in his hand—the stroke that severs the mistletoe—the prayer that each soul receiving any smallest piece will be blessed in life’s sorrows! If I were a great painter, I should like to paint that scene. In the centre should be some young girl, pressing to her heart what she believed to be heaven’s covenant with her under the guise of a blossom. How could you have wished to withhold such a story from me? ”

“ As I set my own thoughts to journey after hers, suddenly the scene in the room changed, and I beheld Georgiana as an old, old lady, with locks of silver on her temples, spectacles, a tiny sock stuck through with needles on her knee, and her face finely wrinkled, but still blooming with unconquerable gayety and youth.
"How sweet that smoke is, Georgiana," I said, rousing us both, and feeling sure that she will understand me in whatsoever figure I may speak. "And how much we are wasting when we change this old oak back into his elements—smoke and light, heat and ashes. ”

“ But, brother, the sole thing with which you, the tinker, do business is the sole thing with which I, the turtle, do not do business. I, as a lawyer, cannot tamper with human life, actuality, truth. During the years that I have been an attorney never have I had a case in court without first of all things looking for the element of imagination in it and trying to stamp that element out of the case and kick it out of the courtroom: that lurking scoundrel, that indefatigable mischief-maker, your beautiful and beloved patron power—imagination. ”

“ In the room was the spiritual hymn of the whole earth from the beginning until now: that somewhere in the universe there is a Father and a Fatherland; that on a dying planet under a dying sun amid myriads of dying stars there is something that does not die—the Youth of Man. In that youth all that had been best in him will come to fullest life; all that was worst will have dropped away.
The room was very still awhile.
Then upon its intense stillness there broke a sound—faint, far away through the snow-thickened air—a melody of coming sleigh-bells. ”

“ Even when the whole company of summer voyagers have sailed back to Kentucky, singing and laughing and kissing one another under the enormous green umbrella of Nature’s leaves, he still is beyond them all in loveliness. But when they have been wafted away again to brighter skies and to soft islands over the sea, and he is left alone on the edge of that Northern world which he has dared invade and inhabit, it is then, amid black clouds and drifting snows, that the gorgeous cardinal stands forth in the ideal picture of his destiny. ”

“ For however dull and petty man may be, however despicable, brutish, abandoned, there has been no lack of sublimity in his vision, in his faith, of what he is to be: that after the last star has gone out in the night of Nature, the orb of his soul will have but begun to flash the immortality of its dawn.
Once and for an immeasurable time the whole earth was warm, and life on it being warmth, the life on it was everywhere. That was Nature’s particular hour of the night just then—it called for a warm earth completely covered with life. ”

“ A hot crowded land, crammed with undergrowth and overgrowth wherever a woodland stood; and around every woodland dense cornfields; or, denser still, the leagues of swaying hemp. The smell of this now lay heavy on the air, seeming to be dragged hither and thither like a slow scum on the breeze, like a moss on a sluggish pond. A deep robust land; and among its growths he—this lad, in his way a self-unconscious human weed, the seed of his kind borne in from far some generations back, but springing out of the soil naturally now, sap of its sap, strength of its strength. ”

“ As I have clung to myself despite the evil, so I have clung to the world despite all the evil that is in the world. To lose faith in men, not humanity; to see justice go down and not believe in the triumph of injustice; for every wrong that you weakly deal another or another deals you to love more and more the fairness and beauty of what is right; and so to turn with ever-increasing love from the imperfection that is in us all to the Perfection that is above us all—the perfection that is God: this is one of the ideals of actual duty that you once said were to be as candles in my hand. ”

“ It is a pleasure to know that one of the most expensive, and certainly the most hideous, fences ever in vogue here is falling into disuse. I mean the worm-fence—called worm because it wriggled over the landscape like a long brown caterpillar, the stakes being the bristles along its back, and because it now and then ate up a noble walnut-tree close by, or a kingly oak, or frightened, trembling ash—a worm that decided the destiny of forests. A pleasure it is, too, to come occasionally upon an Osage orange hedge-row, which is a green eternal fence. ”

“ Thus under the chaste, rigid numbness of convent existence the heart of Sister Dolorosa murmured unheard and hurried away unseen to plains made warm and green by her imagination. But the old may survive upon memories; the young cannot thrive upon hope. Love, long reaching outward in vain, returns to the heart as self-pity. Sympathies, if not supported by close realities, fall in upon themselves like the walls of a ruined house. At last, therefore, even the hidden life of Sister Dolorosa grew weary of the future and the past, and came home to the present. ”

“ Not a very large peach, and scarcely yet yielding a blush to the sun, although its long summer heat is on the wane; growing high in the air at the end of a bough and clustered about by its shining leaves. But what beauty, purity, freshness! You must hunt to find it and climb to reach it; but when you get it, you get it all—there is not a trace left for another. But Sylvia! I am afraid Sylvia is like a big bunch of grapes that hangs low above a public pathway: each passer-by reaches up and takes a grape. ”

“ It was like the magical transformation of a sorrow-shrouded woman back into the shape of her own earliest maidenhood.
Her hair, of the palest gold, would, if unshorn, have covered her figure in a soft, thick golden cloud; but shorn, it lay about her neck and ears in large, lustrous waves that left defined the contour of her beautiful head, and gave to it the aerial charm that belongs to the joyousness of youth. Her whole figure was relaxed into a posture slightly drooping; her bare arms, white as the necks of swans, hung in forgotten grace at her sides ”

“ Scarcely in autumn have the leaves begun to drop from their high perches silently downward when the birds begin to drop away from the bare boughs silently southward. Lo! some morning the leaves are on the ground, and the birds have vanished. The species that remain, or that come to us then, wear the hues of the season, and melt into the tone of Nature's background—blues, grays, browns, with touches of white on tail and breast and wing for coming flecks of snow.
Save only him—proud, solitary stranger in our unfriendly land—the fiery grosbeak. Nature in Kentucky has no wintry harmonies for him. ”

“ The longer I live here, the better satisfied I am in having pitched my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one side, and the green fields, lanes, and woods on the other. Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go to town—to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal. ”

“ The only true lovers, the only real lovers, that women ever have are men of imagination. Why should these men send a common florist's flowers! They grow and offer their own—the roses of Elysium!
To pass on, you must still have clinging to your memory, like bats to a darkened, disused wall, the addresses of various Louisville florists who, by daylight or candlelight and no light at all, were the former emissaries of your folly and your fickleness. Will you send me at once the address of a firm in whose hands I could safely entrust this very high-minded international piece of business? ”

“ She put out the lamp and lighted her candle and set it where it would be screened from his face; and where the shadow of the chamber was heaviest, into that shadow she retired and in it she sat—with furtive look to see whether he observed her.
A pall-like stillness deepened about the bed where he lay.
Running in her veins a wellnigh pure stream across the generations was Anglo-Saxon blood of the world’s fiercest; floating in the tide of it passions of old family life which had dyed history for all time in tragedies of false friendship, false love, and false battle ”

“ As those unexpected random questions had poured in upon him thick and fast, all emerging, as it seemed to him, like disembodied evil spirits from the black pit of Satan and the damned, it was joy to him to deal to each that same straight, God-directed spear-thrust of a reply—killing them as they rose. His soul exulted in that blessed carnage.
But the questions ceased. They had hurried out as though there were a myriad pressing behind—a few issuing bees of an aroused swarm. But they ceased. The pastor leaned back in his chair and drew a quivering breath through his white lips. ”

“ COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY I
The institutions of the Kentuckian have deep root in his rich social nature. He loves the swarm. They very motto of the State is a declaration of good-fellowship, and the seal of the commonwealth the act of shaking hands. Divided, he falls. The Kentuckian must be one of many; must assert himself, not through the solitary exercise of his intellect, but the senses; must see men about him who are fat, grip his friend, hear cordial, hearty conversation, realize the play of his emotions. Society is the multiple of himself. ”

“ It was like day out-of-doors with the moon shining on the snow. We crept towards the garden, screened behind out-buildings. When we reached the fence, we looked through towards the white pyramids. All that part of the ground was alive with rabbits. Georgiana had spread for them a banquet of Lucullus, a Belshazzar's feast. It had been done to please me, I knew, and out of a certain playfulness of her own; out there are other charities of hers, which she thinks known only to herself, that show as well the divine drift of her thoughtfulness. ”

“ You know that when a heavy sleet falls upon the Kentucky forest, the great trees crack and split, or groan and stagger, with branches snapped off or trailing. In adversity it is often so with men. But he is a vast mountain-peak, always calm, always lofty, always resting upon a base that nothing can shake; never higher, never lower, never changing; from every quarter of the earth storms have rushed in and beaten upon him; but they have passed; he is as he was. The heavens have emptied their sleets and snows on his head,—these have made him look only purer, only the more sublime. ”

“ Time never destroys thee, little Sister, or stains thy whiteness; and thou wilt be bending at thy prayers among the green graves on the twilight hill-side ages after I who lie below have finished mine. Pray for me then, pray for thine erring sister, thou pure-souled violet!"
"How cold thou art! Shall I take thee in and warm thee on my bosom? Ah, no! For I know who thou art! Not a bird, but a little brown mendicant friar, begging barefoot in the snow. And thou livest in a cell under the convent eaves opposite my window. What ugly feet thou hast, little Father! ”

“ The summer, too, which had been moving southward, now came slowly back, borne on warm airs that fanned the convent walls and sighed to its chaste lattices with the poetry of dead flowers and vanished songsters. But sighed in vain. With many a prayer, with many a cross on pure brow and shoulder and breast, with many a pious kiss of crucifix, the convent slept. Only some little novice, lying like a flushed figure of Sleep on a couch of snow, may have stirred to draw one sigh, as those zephyrs, toying with her warm hair, broke some earthly dream of too much tenderness. ”

“ Sad, sad to those who remember loved ones gone with their kindnesses the snow of Christmas Eve!
But sadder yet for those who live on together after kindnesses have ceased, or whose love went like a summer wind. Sad is Christmas Eve to them! Dark its snow and blinding!
It was late that night.
She came into the parlor, clasping the bowl of a shaded lamp—the only light in the room. Her face, always calm in life’s wisdom, but agitated now by the tide of deep things coming swiftly in toward her, rested clear-cut upon the darkness. ”

“ These myriads of things mature, ripen, bear their fruit, fall back dead upon the soil of the mind itself. That mind may be the mind of an individual; it may be the mind of a century, a race, a civilization. To the individual, then, to a race, a civilization, a century, arrives the hour when it must either consume its own dead or surrender its own life. These hours are the moral, the intellectual revolutions of history.
The new science must not only clear the stagnant ground for the growth of new ideas, it must go deeper. ”