Martin Ross

“ Some dim understanding of him must have reached Francie, with her ignorant sentimentalities and her Dublin brogue; and as a sea-weed stretches vague arms up towards the light through the conflict of the tides, her pliant soul rose through its inherited vulgarities, and gained some vision of higher things. Christopher could not know how unparalleled a person he was in her existence, of how wholly unknown a type. Hawkins and he had been stars of unimagined magnitude; but though she had attained to the former’s sphere with scarcely an effort, Christopher remained infinitely remote. ”

“ The pace of the engine increased momently, from a tremulous glide to a clattering rush; every movement of the driver’s hand as he heightened the speed was answered by a forward start, like a powerful horse touched with the spur—unhampered by carriage or tender it raced and swung. Slaney held on with both hands, while the wind from the open sides encircled and buffeted her, ardent with heat snatched from the engine fire, bitter with the frost that had turned the bog drain into mirrors for the keen colours of a winter sunset. ”

“ Habituated to the stillness of West Galway life, these stillnesses were vast and expressive beyond any previous experience of mine; in the shadeless brilliance, the bare grayness, I breathed a foreign and tingling air. The people's profoundly self-centred existence has "no thoroughfare" written across it; lying on the warm rocks, they see Ireland stretched silent, enigmatic, apart from them, and are content that it is so. Their poverty is known to many, their way of thought to a few; they remain motionless on the edge of Europe, with the dust of the saints beneath their feet. ”

“ My cousin pacified the fly-tormented Sibbie with a few handfuls of fresh grass, and got out our pewter spoons and other elegances of the luncheon table, while I, grovelling on the floor of the cart, nurtured there the spirit-lamp through one of its most implacable moods. There was a charming stillness, broken only at first by the occasional heavy splash of a leaping salmon in the lake below, and by Sibbie’s leisurely mastications, then the first sulky sigh came from the tin kettle, and a long beckoning finger of blue flame darted from beneath it. ”

“ Somehow, I know not how, we crawled onwards, and by about five o'clock we had rounded the Mizen, a gaunt spike of a headland that starts up like a boar's tusk above the ragged lip of the Irish coast, and the Eileen Oge was beginning to swing and wallop in the long sluggish rollers that the American liners know and despise. I was very far from despising them. Down in the west, resting on the sea's rim, a purple bank of clouds lay awaiting the descent of the sun, as seductively and as malevolently as a damp bed at a hotel awaits a traveller. ”

“ Christian and Barty Mangan walked on in silence that was made companionable by the gurgling whisper of the river behind its screen of hazels and alders; a whisper broken now and again by the tittering laugh of the flying water over a shallow place, like someone with a good story that he cannot quite venture to tell out loud.
Barty was saying to himself, distractedly: "What'll I say to her? What'll I talk to her about?" with each repetition winding himself, like a cocoon, deeper in webs of shyness. ”

“ Glasgow looked at Slaney, at her old-fashioned habit, at her saddle, horned like the moon, at the mare’s tufted fetlocks and dingy curb-chain, and realized that Miss Morris’s most sincere admirers could not attribute to her the sacred quality of smartness. With Mr. Glasgow, as with most of his countrymen, smartness came next to cleanliness and considerably in advance of godliness. He had often ridden with Slaney, and the points he now uncomfortably noted had merely seemed an unimportant part of the background of a life whose charm depended on culture and not on fashion. ”

“ Amy Robsart’s white plume was stuck in the queen’s crown in token of victory, and its feathers rose on end as, with a flourish of the drawing-room poker which she carried as her sceptre, she leaped upon the grave, and continued her dance and song there. Clouds of dust and feathers rose from the cushions, and encouraged by the shouts of her audience, the queen’s dance waxed more furious. There was a stagger, a crash, and a shrill scream rose from the corpse, as the lid gave way, and Queen Elizabeth stood knee-deep in Amy Robsart’s tomb. ”

“ For an instant their wild eyes devoured us and their brethren of the captivity, and then Miss O’Flannigan obeyed her Keltic instincts, and stooped to pick up a stone. At that world-comprehended and world-respected signal they turned all at once, as if blown by a wind, and floated down the green valley-side, whose steepness we had scarcely cared to look at, with heads up, manes and tails streaming, and shoeless hoofs flicking the turf in bounds that seemed headlong, yet never went beyond control. ”

“ Flurry, in the heroic act of plucking a hairpin from her own unshaken golden-red plaits, and yielding it to Philippa, met his eye with a glance that was so expressionless as to amount to a danger signal.
At this moment the hounds jostled over the wall with a clatter of falling stones; they spread themselves in the field like the opening of a fan, they narrowed to the recovered line like the closing of one; Sir Thomas's chestnut hoisted himself and his fifteen-stone burden out of the road with the heave of an earthquake. ”

“ We crossed the yard, and went on past the inevitable cuvier, through a garden full of all-coloured dahlias and wall-fruit, and under the arch of a gateway into a wide shrubbery with elm and chestnut trees shading close-shorn expanses of grass, and a serpentine piece of water, on the farther side of which the largest meadow that we had seen in the much-cultivated Médoc stretched away to a pine wood. ”

“ Between those points, among those heavenly blues and greens and purples, that change and glow and melt into each other in ecstasies of passionate colour, history has been made, and unforgettable things have happened. But standing up there in the wind and the sun, on that small green circle of grass, hearing the sea-birds’ wild and restless cries, watching the waves lift and break into snow on the flanks of the Stag Rocks far below, it is impossible to remember human insanity, impossible to think of anything save of the overwhelming beauty that encircles you. ”

“ Instead of the broad-backed horse, galloping on roads that were white in the sun and haze of the strong March day, with the large frieze-clad waist to meet her arms about, and the laughter and shouting of the pursuers coming to her ear, there would be a long and miry tramping in the darkness, behind her spouse, with talk of guano and geese and pigs' food, and a perfect foreknowledge of how he would complete, at the always convenient shebeen, the glorious fabric of intoxication, of which the foundation had been well and duly laid at the funeral. ”

“ Cadogan and Biddy Mahony rose magnificently to the occasion, cursing, thumping, shoving; and stable buckets, coal buckets, milk pails, and kettles were unearthed and sent swinging down the grass slope to the lake that lay in glittering unconcern in the morning sunshine. Men, women, and children worked in a way that only Irish people can work on an emergency. All their cleverness, all their good-heartedness, and all their love of a ruction came to the front; the screaming and the exhortations were incessant, but so were also the buckets that flew from hand to hand up to the loft. ”