Thomas Cooper

“ So he betook himself to bed. But alas! poor Toby's frame had been so completely weakened by fasting, and his indulgence of the marvelling propensity of his constitution had rendered his understanding and will so powerless, that he felt like a being that has no longer any self-government. The head,—the queer head that Frank had seen,—with its fiery eyes and mouth,—was all Toby could think about, as he lay tossing to and fro in bed:—"What a marvellous sight it must have been!" ”

“ In the course of a very few minutes, however, Zed was again unable, from sheer weariness, to proceed, and, although he changed his implement again for the spade, yet his back ached too violently for him to go on with his gold-finding, so he sat down once more to rest, and wiped the streaming perspiration from his aged face with a hand that trembled, as indeed he trembled all over, like an aspen leaf.
"Mercy on us!" cried Phil, "how you puff and blow, Zed! Do you begin to feel ill with your hard work?" ”

“ The freedom from fear—nay, the cheerfulness and exultation he experiences when surrounded by the waste of waters, far away from the enjoyments of house and home; the unsubduable resolution with which he careers over the wave and encounters every vicissitude of season and climate; the strength and vastness of the element itself which is the chief scene of his daring enterprise: these are considerations that ever interweave themselves with our ideal of the sea-adventurer, and render him the object of more profound and ardent admiration than the mere traveller by land. ”

“ In spite of all his life-long dreams and fancies, and in spite of straitness in his means of living, Toby was a happy old man; for, with all the startling activity of his imagination, Toby had never corrupted his bodily vigour by a single act of intemperance. When Joe returned to bury his aged foster-mother, Toby walked, by the help of two sticks, to the grave-side, declaring that he saw two lovely angels walking before the coffin, all the way from the dame's door, and he knew they would come for him next. ”

“ Competence, amounting, at length, well-nigh to wealth, beamed upon him, and, ere his grey hairs went down to the grave, he lived to leave a crown-piece, often, at the door of the ragged and wretched man who was once his envious persecutor and the oppressive overseer.—Tim Swallow-whistle preserved, even to his dying day, that nobility of heart which forbade him to triumph over a fallen enemy; but he would often repeat, half mechanically, to himself, when passing from the poverty-stricken door of Prim the Puritan, "Every dog has his day." ”

“ Yet clown and maid
Give eager aid,—
And all, as they rattle the huge block along,
Seem to court the joke
Of Dick's wain-whip stroke,—
Be it ever so smart, none thinks he hath wrong;—
Till with mirthsome glee,
The old ash tree
Hath come to the threshold of Torksey hall,—
Where its brave old heart
A glow shall impart
To the heart of each guest at the festival.
And through the porch, a jocund crowd,
They rush, with heart-born laughter loud ”

“ Perseverance—Perseverance—has guided and sinewed men’s love of the beautiful and powerful in melody and harmony, until, from the simple utterance of a few notes of feeling, rudely conveyed from sire to son by renewed utterance, Music has grown up into a science, dignified and adorned by profound theorists, like Albrechtsberger, and by sublime creative geniuses, such as the majestic Handel and sweetest Haydn and universal Mozart and sublime Beethoven. ”

“ The bull rose, blurred, and ran bang upon Dick, goring his ribs, throwing him up, and, bounding to the other side of the field, left the scratcher senseless upon the grass, and all before you could have found breath to say, "Jack Robinson!" had you been looking on, like the gamekeeper and farmer and dame Dobson.
Nothing in the wide world could have given the gamekeeper greater pleasure than Dick's overthrow. ”

“ Said Thorold to his daughter;
"We thought to hear, at our Yule feast,
A lay of mirth and laughter;
[Pg 34] But, to thy harp, thou well hast sung
A song that may impart,
For future hours, to old and young,
Deep lessons to the heart.
Yet, should not life be all a sigh!
Good Snell, do thou a burthen try
Shall change our sadness into joy:
Such as thou trollest in blythe mood,
On days of sunshine in the wood. ”

“ How tremendous must be the sense of danger to the tenants of a frail ship amidst such gigantic forces of nature, the most inexperienced reader can form some conception. But, overwhelming as the feeling of awe must be with the sailor surrounded with such terrors, it must be infinitely more tolerable than the prolonged and indescribably irksome heart-ache he experiences when inclosed for months in fixed ice, encompassed on every hand with desolation. ”

“ Thus, without written pattern or oral instructor, the orphan apprentice endeavoured, by the selection of such materials as lay within his grasp, to build up, within himself, a mental fabric of seemly architecture. But, to cut short observations that are already too protracted,—Joe, with all his efforts after mental discipline, was, at twenty-one, what all the lonely self-educated must be at that age, often the slave of his own hypothesis when he believed himself to be following the most legitimate deductions from an authenticated fact,—oftener a visionary than a true philosopher. ”

“ If there was a sacred corner in Tom's heart, it was that where the precious images of his father and mother were enshrined. Toil, fatigue, hunger, pain, loss of sleep, nay, death itself, he would have encountered at any moment to benefit them; and, young as he was, he formed strong judgments on men's characters who failed in parental duty. He never swore but once in his life, before leaving home, and that was when a young farmer in the parish married a flaunting wife, and gave up his aged father, blind and palsy-stricken, to be placed in an alms-house. ”

“ As it is in the elaboration of Literature’s most perfect products so it is in Art: into the mind his images must be taken; there they must be wrought up into new combinations and shapes of beauty or of power; and from this grand repository the statuary or painter, like the poet, must summon his forms anew, evermore returning, dutifully, to compare them with Nature and actual life, and sparing no effort to clothe them with the attribute of veri-similitude.
Need it be argued, then, that without perseverance the world would have beheld none of the wonders of high Art? ”