Various authors

“ As the first gaunt fingers of dawn reached through the open window of his sleeping room, Tang Ling rose wearily to his feet. Within a few hours he had become a dried up old man. He felt as if his flesh had been burned away and only bleached bones remained. Moaning slightly, he crept through the garden. He longed to hurry so that he might be free of this dreadful ordeal but speed was impossible. Though he fell twice, somehow he reached the baking-oven. With great effort he drew the beloved vase from it and placed it gently on the ground. ”

“ I will kneel as she comes to me, and in the warmth of her young arms I will become young once more."
"Are you setting nets to catch the moon?" asked Trent bitterly.
"That is why I hesitate," sighed Mu Lin. "I speak of spring and yet the autumn gale blows wildly through the grass. Her body has the eloquence of jade. I gaze upon her face with the eyes of my heart, and I pray to the God of Longevity that he will help me in this supreme hour. She stands there waiting and I hesitate. The flower of yesteryear will bloom again, but not the flower of man's youth. ”

“ Everything had been tidied, straightened; the dressing-table was bare, the books, papers, even the medicine-bottles had been cleared away. His favourite armchair—the chair, she remembered with a shiver, in which he had died—had been ranged stiffly, itself a dead thing, against the wall. There was no trace of life, or suggestion of it, in an emptiness which ached. Mrs. Rathbourne gazed at the mechanically arranged furniture in a baffled way, dimly realising that the soul of the room had fled from it, as it had from the body of the man she loved. ”

“ All nature had paused to watch the charming spell of Kum-Kum, who danced with the abandon of one who lived each moment to the full. Her body swayed and undulated. When she gazed at Jolly Cauldron she smiled as though she were making sport of him. She seemed to lead him on for the sheer pleasure of ultimately repulsing him. But still he did not move; still he crouched ape-like in the sand.
Then came the storm. The thunder ripped the heavens in two and the rain poured down in sheets of chilling coldness. A sharp wind rose from nowhere and played havoc with the veranda lights. ”

“ Repeatedly, the storms of iron and lead swept the ship, until her handlines were frozen red, until blood sloshed and froze about her gun-carriages. Yet the voice of Iberville lifted clear and calm, while Bess Adams relayed his orders, one arm useless and her eyes like burning stars in a white face.
Roundshot and musketry and grape poured into the doomed frigate; but ever she gave back shot for shot. If a helmsman was hit, another man took his place at the reddened tiller. Her gunners died, and staggering sick men came reeling from below to man the cannon with scarecrow hands. ”

“ The thought stabbed him with such acute pain it even eclipsed, if that were possible, the fury of the intense oven-heat, for oven-heat it was. His bed had become as hot as the ovens at the foot of the garden. But all this intense suffering had to be. And somehow he survived it even as his countrymen for ages have endured every disaster—flood, starvation, pestilence and invasion, and through it all remained courteous, philosophic, serene as though they knew that inevitably all would be well once more. ”

“ I had never doubted what he was come to do; and now I knew that while my body sat safe in the cheerful little church, he had been hunting my soul in the Court of the Dragon.
I crept to the door; the organ broke out overhead with a blare. A dazzling light filled the church, blotting the altar from my eyes. The people faded away, the arches, the vaulted roof vanished. I raised my scared eyes to the fathomless glare, and I saw the black stars hanging in the heavens: and the wet winds from the Lake of Hali chilled my face. ”

“ Human manners and human institutions he seems invariably to have surveyed with an eye of passion or prejudice, instead of viewing them with the calmness of a philosopher, who meditates how they may be rectified, or what lessons may be drawn from them. In every country his soul felt as if confined by the bonds of society; he everywhere panted for something more free in governments, more elevated in sentiment, mere devoted in love, and more perfect in friendship. ”

“ By and by the knowledge of where I was dawned on me—in a land as real as our own world and yet but a reflection of it, in the realm of those unseen doubles that thrive upon the marrow of their terrestrial counterparts, that exploit their originals and grow into ever huger shapes, the more the latter eat themselves up in vain hoping and waiting for happiness and joy. ”

“ Hence it comes about, that when we are set down for a brief Sunday, far from the central roar, our first sensation is that of a stillness corporeal, positive, aggressive. The clamorous ocean of sound has ebbed to an infinite distance; in its place this other sea of fullest silence conies crawling up, whelming and flooding us, its crystalline waves lapping us round with a possessing encirclement as distinct as that of the other angry tide now passed away and done with. The very Spirit of Silence is sitting hand in hand with us, and her touch is a real warm thing. ”

“ Bitter was the heart of Xeethra, thinking himself a dreamer beguiled by some idle dream. He shrank from the high splendor of Canopus, as if from a flame too bright to bear; but, ere he could turn away, it seemed that a column of shadow, darker than the night and thicker than any cloud, rose upward before him from the terrace and blotted out the effulgent star. Out of the solid stone the shadow grew, towering tall and colossal ”

“ The future had taken on a rosy hue, somewhat akin to that pale pink color of Chinese porcelain for which Mei-Mei yearned.
Until the moon rose that night he remained in his garden, until the soft flush of sunset had blended into the purpling folds of night. The scent of lotuses sweetened, the breeze intensified, the stars bloomed out like wondrous lanterns hanging in the sky. The world was suffused in a riot of beauty. Tsang Kee Foo rose to his feet. ”

“ Fo Wen was well educated though he had never attended school. His father had taught him to read and write. The beauty of his brush strokes might have brought envy to an artist. Nature, too, had been his teacher. From the wind in the willows he learned sweet songs which he longed to translate into words; from the sky at evening he drew inspiration and serenity; from the glory of scented pine trees he drew faith. So it was but natural he worshipped their god. That the god was all but bankrupt as far as worshippers were concerned, he did not know. ”

“ Passion
By Richard Garnett, LL.D., C.B.
This flame of Passion that so high in air,
⁠By spice and balsam of the spirit fed,
⁠With fire and fume vast Heaven hath overspread,
And blots the stars with smoke, or dims with glare:
Soon shall it droop, and radiance pure and fair
⁠Again from azure altitudes be shed;
⁠And we the murky grime and embers red
Shall sift, if haply dust of Love be there. ”

“ Who longs for joy, who chooses joy,
Will reap the sorrow which it brings:
Who never yearns nor waits for joy,
Has never yearned for sorrow's end."
And an inexplicable longing for death came over me, and I yearned to die.
But in my heart, life gave battle—the instinct for self-preservation. And death and life were ominously arrayed against each other; that is catalepsy.
My eyes stared, motionless. The acrobat bent over me, and I noticed his wrinkled tricot, the greenish lid on his head, and his ruffled neck.
"Catalepsy," I wanted to stammer, but I could not open my mouth. ”

“ Steadily the blue light became stronger, and in my mind arose the certitude that it emanated from the Blue Image. Demon faces peered at us from cracks and crevices, but none of the devils of the place found hardihood to attack us.
The tunnel debouched into a great cavern. In the exact center, on a mound of bleached skulls stood the source of the blue radiance—the Sapphire Witch herself. I gasped in awed admiration at the flawless perfection of her beauty—and suddenly, how I did hate that sorcerer Agnor Halit, to whom I'd promised to deliver that exquisite Image of Incomparable Loveliness! ”

“ That night the doctor spent long hours in his garden. It was refreshing to hear the wind chattering in the tall bamboo. When daylight cleft the sky with streaks of light, like new-drawn swords, his knives would be at work on the loathesome Yoshida. ”

“ At last the little feast is quite, quite finished. Beauty has gone home; her lover still carries her face in his heart as she waved and waved and waved to him from the rattling lighted tramcar; long he sits and sits thinking of her, gazing up at those lonely ancient stars; the air is still bright with her presence, sweet with her thoughts, warm with her kisses, and as he turns to the shut piano, he can still see her white hands on the keys and her girlish face raised in an ecstasy—Beata Beatrix—above the music. ”

“ Much happened on that ship that I should like to relate, but if I did it would be like singing an endless, mournful chantey of the sea. Day followed day, week followed week in utter monotony. On all that ship there were no two men who trusted each other, no two who were even casual friends. They had known all the horrors and hatreds of life, and their faith in things was utterly shattered. Gradually I grew as crafty as the rest. I fawned over Jolly Cauldron, became a thing of the most despicable hyprocrisy. ”

“ A blast that caught the little lamp full in its foul, yellow flame-tongue, left Wladislaw in the dark. He felt about for matches; perhaps no act could have so certainly restored him to this world, from which his thoughts had wandered. He found none anywhere. His straying hand came upon the garment; he caught it up and slipped it over his head, half horrified to feel that it came below his collar-bone in the neck, and left his arms with only half-a-dozen inches of sleeve.
Matches were lurking in his trousers pocket, and he had the sulphury splutter going in a moment and the lamp re-lit. ”

“ No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity. Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings—that one no longer has a self—that is the nameless summit of agony and dread.
He knew that there had been a Randolph Carter of Boston, yet could not be sure whether he—the fragment or facet of an entity beyond the Ultimate Gate—had been that one or some other. ”

“ Strange to think that a little silver coin of no possible use or beauty in itself can be exchanged for so much tangible beautiful pleasure. A piece of money is like a piece of opium, for in it lie locked up the most wonderful dreams—if you have only the brains and hearts to dream them.
When at last the little feast grew near its end, Love and Beauty would smoke their cigarettes together; and it was a favourite trick of theirs to lower the lamp a moment, so that they might see the stars rush down upon them through the skylight which hung above their table. ”

“ The barracuda rose again, this time within twenty feet of the beach, and Hewitt lay locked along the steel-gray back, his hands closed in a viselike grip about the terrible jaws, his tensed muscles corded with the fearful strain. Over and over, sidewise, backwards, forward, moved fish and man as one, locked together in dives and turns and dashes so swift as to baffle the gaping eyes of the amazed onlookers, standing now in a wondering, intrigued row upon the edge of the sand. ”

“ However, could men live without magic—the magic of flowers, the magic of the little rain of China gently falling, the magic of the night sky, the magic of the caress of a beloved woman, the magic of sleep when day's work is over? ”

“ More than once I felt myself on the verge of madness—thinking of Jean, and remembering Futaine's ominous words. Eventually agony brought its own surcease, and I fell into a kind of coma, lasting for how long I could not guess. Many hours had passed, I knew, before I heard footsteps coming toward my prison.
Jean moved into my range of vision. I searched her face with my eyes, seeking for some mark of a dreadful metamorphosis. I could find none. Her beauty was unmarred, save for the terrible little wounds on her throat. She went to a couch and quietly lay down. Her eyes closed. ”

“ If I but raise my hand, all the riches of the world fall to me. Tis not what I wish for."
Into her eyes came such a glitter as the moon makes on the moist skin of a sleeping snake. The firmness of her lips relaxed; they grew child-like in their softness. The atmosphere became almost tangible: I could scarce breathe.
"What is it? All that I can do, if it be no sin."
"Come with me to my loom," she said, "and if you do the thing I desire you shall see him. There is no evil in't—in past times kings have sighed for the same." ”

“ When the words ended, he beheld no longer the shadow towering against Canopus. The star flamed with a pristine splendor, as if no cloud had ever dimmed it; and without sense of change or transition, he who watched the star was none other than King Amero; and the goatherd Xeethra, and the emissary, and the pledge given to Thasaidon, were as things that had never been. The ruin that had come upon Shathair was no more than the dream of some mad prophet; for in the nostrils of Amero the perfume of languorous flowers mingled with salt sea-balsams ”

“ Her book of life is Paris; she knows her Paris by heart; and whoso knows Paris can dispense with further knowledge. She adores originality and novelty, but she can herself transmute the commonplace into the original, the old into the new. Whatever she touches forthwith reflects her own animation, her mobility, her elusive charm. Flowers have no loveliness until she has grouped them; colours are colourless unless they suit her complexion. ”