Theodore Winthrop

“ I knew how, long ago in childhood, he had made Nature friend, and found his earliest comrades among flowers and birds. I knew, for he had been my teacher, how, when youth first looked widely forth for visions of the Infinite, he had learned to comprehend, day after day, night after night, the large delight of heaven; whether the busy heaven, when the golden sun makes our sky blue above us, and reveals on earth the facts that we must deal with and by which we must be taught our laws, or the quiet heaven of night, with its starry tokens of grander fruition, when we shall live for grander days. ”

“ Bill stuck close to her side.
“Is this true, Belle?” he said, almost doubtfully.
“True as truth!”
She put out her hand. He took it, and they skated on together, — hearts beating to the rhythm of their movements. The uproar and merriment of the village came only faintly to them. It seemed as if all Nature was hushed to listen to their plighted troth, their words of love renewed, more earnest for long suppression. The beautiful ice spread before them, like their life to come, a pathway untouched by any sorrowful or weary footstep. The blue sky was cloudless. ”

“ She was brilliant, frivolously brilliant perhaps; but we pardon a dash of frivolity in a young woman of fashion, all her life flattered and caressed, and untrained by daily contact with men of strong minds and women of strong hearts.
Emma Denman stood just on the hither brink of genius. It seemed that, if some magnificent emotion, some heart-opening joy or grief, could befall her, she would suddenly be promoted to become herself, and that self a genius. If she could be once in earnest, she would be a noble woman. Such a character has a mighty charm to a lover. ”

“ Wherever I rode into the sombre vista, and turned by chance to trace the trail behind me, the dark-purple trunks, drew together, like a circuit of palisades, and closed after, crowding me forward down the narrow inevitable way, as ugly sins, co-operating only to evolve an uglier remorse, forbid the soul to turn back to purity, and crowd it, shrinking, on into blacker falseness to itself.
Before my courage was quelled by a superstitious dread that from this austere wood was no escape, I came upon a river, cleaving the darkness with a broad belt of sunshine. A river signifies much on the earth. ”

“ Wade was now in fine trim. The air was more glittering and electric than ever. It was triumph and victory and pæan in action to go flashing along over this footing, smoother than polished marble and sheenier than first-water gems.
Wade felt the high exhilaration of pure blood galloping through a body alive from top to toe. The rhythm of his movement was like music to him.
The Point ended in a sharp promontory. Just before he came abreast of it, Wade under mighty headway flung into his favorite corkscrew spiral on one foot, and went whirling dizzily along, round and round, in a straight line. ”

“ I gave one more look at the caravan we had seen winding so beautifully down on the plain, no longer ago than yesterday evening. Rosy morning brightened on every wagon of the great ellipse. Not a soul was to be seen of all their tenants. I recognized Mr. Clitheroe’s habitation at the farther end. That, too, had the same mysterious, deserted air, as if the sad pair who dwelt in it had desperately wandered away into the desert by night.
Brent would not turn. He kept his haggard face bent eastward, toward the horizon, where an angry sunrise began to thrust out the quiet hues of dawn. ”

“ I do not wish to make him too much a hero. “Death,” says Bacon, “openeth the gate to good fame.” When a neighbor dies, his form and quality appear clearly, as if he had been dead a thousand years. Then we see what we only felt before. Heroes in history seem to us poetic because they are there. But if we should tell the simple truth of some of our neighbors, it would sound like poetry. Winthrop was one of the men who represent the manly and poetic qualities that always exist around us, — not great genius, which is ever salient, but the fine fibre of manhood that makes the worth of the race. ”

“ Katahdin, — the more I saw of it, the more grateful I was to the three powers who enabled me to see it: to Nature for building it, to Iglesias for guiding me to it, to myself for going.
We sat upon the deck and let Katahdin grow, — and sitting, talked of mountains, somewhat to this effect: —
Mountains are the best things to be seen. Within the keen outline of a great peak is packed more of distance, of detail, of light and shade, of color, of all the qualities of space, than vision can get in any other way. No one who has not seen mountains knows how far the eye can reach. ”

“ The mountain lines grew sharper; the country where we travelled, rougher, every stride. We came upon a wide tract covered with wild-sage bushes. These delayed and baffled us. It was a pigmy forest of trees, mature and complete, but no higher than the knee. Every dwarfed, stunted, gnarled bush, had the trunk, limbs, twigs, and gray, withered foliage, all in miniature, of some tree, hapless but sturdy, that has had a weather-beaten struggle for life on a storm-threshed crag by the shore, or on a granite side of a mountain, with short allowance of soil to eat and water to drink. ”

“ Every look, tone, gesture of a man is a symbol of his complete nature. If we apply the microscope severely enough, we can discern the fine organism by which the soul sends itself out in every act of the being. And the more perfectly developed the creature, the more significant, and yet the more mysterious, is every habit, and every motion mightier than habit, of body or soul.
In an instant, the lady so sweetly heralded stepped from beneath the hood of the wagon, and sprang to the ground in more busy and cheerful guise than her voice had promised. ”

“ I knew that a woman may blind herself to the measure and quality of a man’s admiration; I knew that she can even desperately accept his heart; but I also knew that only a woman thoroughly deteriorated by deceit can listen to a lover’s final words of trust, and still conceal from him one single fact in all her history that might forbid his love. She must reveal, or let her lover know she cannot reveal. She will, unless she has grown base and shameless, scorn to be a lie — yes, even for a moment, after the avowal of love — a lie to one she loves, whatever the truth may cost. ”

“ And who can yet say whether it was well and wisely done?”
“Well and wisely!” said Churm. “You are saved, and the tempter is dead.”
“Ah!” Dreeme sighed, “what desolate days I passed in my prison in Chrysalis! I felt like one dead, as the world supposed me, — like one murdered, — one walled up in a living grave; and I gave myself no thought of ever emerging into life again. Why should I love daylight? What was there for me there? Only treachery. Who? Only traitors. I had no one in the world to trust. I dwelt alone with God.” ”

“ Fire gnaws quicker than the tooth of Time. I was sitting, drowsy and cowering, near my furnace, when a warning noise aroused me. A catastrophe was at hand. Flames grew intenser, and careered with leaps more frantic, as now, with a riving uproar, the giant old trunk cut away at its base, cracked, trembled, swayed, and fell in sublime ruin. At this strange tumult, loud and harsh in the dull dead of night, the horses, affrighted, looked up with the light of the flame in their eyes, and then dashed off furiously.
Fudnun also was startled. ”

“ God has given me much that is good and beautiful. The atmosphere of my existence is healthy. But there is one memory in my heart which I have never ventured to recall until this moment, — which I bear down upon and crowd back whenever it stirs and struggles to burst up into daylight. There is one memory which has power to burn away my earthly bliss with a single touch, and to throw such a ghastly coloring over all the world, that my neighbor seems a traitor and my Creator my foe. That memory is the look I saw Emma Denman give to Densdeth. ”

“ A perfect garden, — crowded with infinite delicacy and refinement of leaf and flower, — where there is no spot that is not blossom, or leafage, or dim recess where faded petals may lie, — where all seems so fair with these cloud-like creatures of white, these wreaths of azure bloom, and stars of scarlet, that this gentler beauty of earth almost wins us to forget the grander beauty we have known on the summits far away. ”

“ The father so charmed him that he felt himself, for his sake, taking a very tender fraternal interest in the young lady. It was so easy to picture her in her chamber, not a mile away, looking tearfully for help toward the hills. It was so easy to fancy her face, — her father’s, with the bloom of youth instead of the shades of sorrow; and her character, — her father’s, with all this gentleness that perhaps weakened him, in her but sweet womanliness. Peter Skerrett perceived to the full the romance of the adventure. He frequently felt the undeveloped true lover in him grow restive. ”

“ Truth, Virtue, Courage, and the sister qualities, Lucy had dimpled into the bronzed cheeks, as a sailor pricks an anchor, or Polly’s name, into a brother tar’s arm with India ink. She had given the hero’s face a smile, yeasty, sugary, and pungent enough to convert the dullest dough heart into light gingerbread. She had bestowed upon her ideal a look that would be surgery to scarred shins and light fantasy to the weariest toes. Now she passed her finger over the chestnut-leaf moustache to smooth down its serrated edges. ”

“ Cyclops and gnomes, to say nothing of more demoniac craftsmen, would never have capped their domes and pyramids with lightsome snow. But mountains, the most signal of earthly facts, are transfigured from gloom to glory by the gentlest creature of all that float and fall, — the snow-flake. It is not enough that air should lie in clouds, and float in mists, and linger in violet haze in every dell of the lower mountains, but there must be a grander beauty than bare mountains, rich with play of strong color, and softened with shadow, can express. ”

“ They build their log-station, pile up barrels of pork, beans, and molasses, like mortars and Paixhans in an arsenal, and are ready for a winter of stout toil and solid jollity.
Stout is the toil, and the life seemingly dreary, to those who cower by ingle-nooks or stand over registers. But there is stirring excitement in this bloodless war, and around plenteous camp-fires vigor of merriment and hearty comradry. Men who wield axes and breathe hard have lungs. Blood aerated by the air that sings through the pine-woods tingles in every fibre. Tingling blood makes life joyous. ”

“ Tacoma was so white and glittering, that it seemed to stare at him very terribly and mockingly, and to know his shameful avarice, and how it led him to take from starving women their cherished lip and nose jewels of hiaqua, and to give them in return only tough scraps of dried elk-meat and salmon. When men are shabby, mean, and grasping, they feel reproached for their grovelling lives by the unearthliness of nature’s beautiful objects, and they hate flowers, and sunsets, mountains, and the quiet stars of heaven. ”

“ Honor seemed wisdom; truth the only strength; generosity its own reward; chivalry the expression in manners of a loyal heart. All the brave joyousness of my nature responded to this laugh of Dreeme’s, and spoke out boldly in my echoing one. Each of us perceived new sympathy in the other.
Locksley now made his reappearance with the volcano. The oysters crackled in the stove, fizzed and bubbled over the lamp on the table.
The poetic temperament takes in happiness and good cheer as a bud takes sunshine. Dreeme expanded more and more. His silver laugh flowed free in chastened merriment. ”

“ Behind was the rolling region where the Great Trail passes; before and far away, the faint blue of the Sierra. Not a bird sang in the hot noon; not a cricket chirped. No sound except the beat of our horses’ hoofs on the pavement. We rode side by side, taking our strides together. It was a waiting race. The horses travelled easily. They learned, as a horse with a self-possessed rider will, that they were not to waste strength in rushes. “Spend, but waste not,”—not a step, not a breath, in that gallop for life! ”