Marie Louise de la Ramée

“ She seemed to me to live quite innocently and most simply, for she, too, was very poor. Poverty for myself I had never esteemed as any sort of ill: I thought that in it men were healthy, strong, untempted, and most manlike. But it made my heart ache to watch that little bare chamber which was all her home.
She was so infinitely lovely, so golden-bright, so rose-like, so dainty in hue and shape, that it seemed to me she ought to be housed as graciously as a butterfly in a lily cup, as a little blue warbler in a summer nest of leaves. ”

“ Away there, north and south, and east and west, the earth was alive with the mirth and the music and the triumphs and the passions of men.
He forgot that there were pain and privation and struggle and sorrow there also; he only remembered the world as an orchard of fruit and of flowers, fair to behold and to taste, full of sunshine eternal, and musical with tireless song. That Winter came there, and sickness, and grief, and death, he had forgotten.
The boat was on the edge of the sea, tied by a rope to a pine-tree, and with the oars of it lying on the beach. ”

“ Della Rocca did notice it, with that delicate unerring Italian perception, which is as fine as a needle and as subtle as mercury.
He saw, too, that something had come over her; some cloud; some change; she had lost much of her proud serenity, and she looked at him now and then with what seemed to him almost like contrition; she avoided being alone with him; he was troubled at it, but not alarmed; he knew very well that she loved him. He let her be.
An Italian has infinite passion, but he has also infinite patience in matters of love. ”

“ All through the long day he worked unweariedly among the reedy waters, under the frowning shadow of the monastery-crowned rocks. And from her cell she gazed on him—on the bold heroic cast of the head, and the sun-warmed brow from which the waves of hair were dashed; gazed on him where, under the cypress shadows, through the sere rushes, through the sullen waters, he toiled as peasants toil, for her—for her, though she had bidden him forsake even her memory for ever, though she had told him that suffering alone could be his portion through her. ”

“ Sometimes, when Musa came up from the shadow of the tombs into all that abounding light, that universal fragrance, that immense sense of life and loveliness, in which she could almost hear the green earth growing, she would stretch out her arms in love of it all and gratitude, and cry out aloud to the sunlit solitude:
'I, too, am happy! I, too, live!'
Every pulse of life in her rejoiced with rejoicing nature. She envied no more the water birds sailing all day beside their nests; she no more wondered why the woodlark sang praise, praise, praise, and nothing but praise, to the Creator of all. ”

“ The Greek was always before him; now and again they well-nigh touched, and the foam from his horse's bit was flung on the steaming flanks of the mare he chased; now and again the dull thud of the hoofs thundered almost side by side as they scattered sand and surf, or trampled out the odorous dews from trodden roses. His enemy's life lay in the hollow of his hand; he saw the womanish beauty of Phaoleon's face, white and ghastly with a craven terror, turned backward one instant in the light of the moon, and a fierce delight, a just vengeance, heated his senses and throbbed in his veins. ”

“ Our stove was not more chill, our garret not more empty; our darkness not more dark amidst the gay, glad, dazzling city; our dusky roof and looming crown that shut the sky out from us not more gloomy and impenetrable than they had been on all those other earlier nights when yet we had been happy. Yet how intensified millionfold seemed cold and loneliness and poverty and darkness, all!—for we had for the first time known what it was to think of riches, of fame, of homage, of light, as possible, and then to lose them all for ever! ”

“ Liberty, for the breath of the wind on their brows, for the splash of river-spray on their lips, for the wild joy of fearless speed, for the fragrance of trampled flowers, for the limitless glory of sight free to range over the width of the earth, for the nameless rapture of living when every sense and pulse of life is hot as with wine, yet is lulled as with sleep, and holds the pain of the world well endured for the sake of one hour of joy;—Liberty, in whose sweetness lies all the ecstasy of life, and in whose loss lies all its anguish. ”

“ But if you ever meet again one who loves you as I have loved, remember me—and spare him."
The generous answer died in his throat; never again, he knew, would he look upon the loveliness that had betrayed him; he knew that he was going to his death, as surely as though he sank into the sea-depths glistening below, and that when he should lie in the darkness and decay of a forgotten soldier's grave, there would be no pang of memory for him in her heart, no thought that gave him pity or lament in the life to which his own was sacrificed. ”

“ His eyes gazed at her sullenly, wonderingly, yet with a gleam of gratitude, like the gleam in the eyes of a fierce dog which, after being lashed and chained through years, is loosened by a tender hand, and wonders, distrusts, and yet is thankful.
'If you do come back you will be brave as men are rarely,' he said, with a gloom deep as night upon his darkening face.
'I will come,' she said simply; then she looked up once in his face, put the lamp down on the stone, and went.
'Perhaps I should have killed her,' thought Saturnino. ”

“ I bade him be brought to my judgment, that your vengeance might strike him, and lay him dead at my feet. I am no holier than you. There was an hour in which I longed for his life with that thirst you know now; there was an hour in which I would have taken it, and not spared, though his mother had prayed to me. Ah, friends! such hours come to all. But now, the darkness has passed. I see clearer. Death is not ours to deal. And were it ours, should we give him the nameless mystic mercy which all men live to crave—give it as the chastisement of crime? Death! ”

“ For a love that already had cost him a year of pain to a few short hours of hope; for a woman of whom he knew nothing, not even whether she were the wife or the mistress of another; for the miserable fever of restless passion, for the haunting torment of unattainable joys, for the intoxication of tempest-tossed desires, for the shadows of surrounding doubt and mystery. Better far let the strange charm that had enthralled him be cut away at any cost, and go back to that old life while there was yet time. The thought crossed him for the moment as he drifted from the quay of the Golden Horn. ”

“ It is only to those who have never lived that death ever can seem beautiful.
To Este, who had been happy when his mistress kissed him, when his boat floated over the fields of reeds, when the moon came up over the meadows and the waters, and the throb of a lute beat on the soft air like the sigh of Aphrodite herself—to Este, the tomb and the galleys were, alike, a yawning void, in which he would sink and perish. The dread of them—a natural dread like that of the Greeks of old—weighed on him and made his sight blind, his ears deaf, his soul insensible. ”

“ The boat waited in a creek, floating there under so dark a shadow from the drooping boughs of lemon and acacia, that it was atmost in twilight: a few strokes of the oars, and it swept out of the brown ripples, flinging up their surf against the rocks, into the deep blue of the sunlit bay; below, above, around on every side, colour in all its glory, all its variety, all its harmony and contrast, melting into one paradise in the warmth of the summer day.
"I love the sea more dearly than any land. It is incarnate freedom!" ”