Alexander Smith

“ Perhaps what he has seen of the world, its sins, its sorrows, its death-beds, its widows and orphans, has tamed his spirit and put a tenderness into his wit. I do not think I have ever encountered a man who so adorns his sacred profession. His pious, devout nature produces sermons just as naturally as my apple-trees produce apples. He is a tree that flowers every Sunday. Very beautiful in his reverence for the Book, his trust in it; through long acquaintance, its ideas have come to colour his entire thought, and you come upon its phrases in his ordinary speech. ”

“ He sees marketable pathos in his friend's death-bed. He carries the peal of his daughter's marriage-bells into his sentences or his rhymes; and in these the music sounds sweeter to him than in the sunshine and the wind. If originally of a meditative, introspective mood, his profession can hardly fail to confirm and deepen his peculiar temperament. He begins to feel his own pulse curiously, and for a purpose. As a spy in the service of literature, he lives in the world and its concerns. Out of everything he seeks thoughts and images, as out of everything the bee seeks wax and honey. ”

“ If you know these ballads, you will find that they mirror perfectly your every mood. If you are weary and down-hearted, behold, a verse starts to your memory trembling with the very sigh you have heaved. If you are merry, a stanza is dancing to the tune of your own mirth. If you love, be you ever so much a Romeo, here is the finest language for your using. If you hate, here are words which are daggers. If you like battle, here for two hundred years have trumpets been blowing and banners flapping. If you are dying, plentiful are the broken words here which have hovered on failing lips. ”

“ Have you ever been in a crowd in which a man is being led to death, and, seeing a wild, pale face, know by that sign that you are looking upon the doomed creature?—so wild, so pale looked Constance when she stood before the king and people. The tears ran down Alla's face. 'Go fetch a book,' cried he; 'and if this knight swears that the woman is guilty, she shall surely die.' The book was brought, the knight took the oath, and that moment an unseen hand smote him on the neck, so that he fell down on the floor, his eyes bursting out of his head. ”

“ Love in a cottage, with a broken window to let in the rain, is not my idea of comfort; no more is Dignity, walking forth richly clad, to whom every head uncovers, every knee grows supple. Bruin in winter-time fondly sucking his own paws, loses flesh; and love, feeding upon itself, dies of inanition. Take the candle of death in your hand, and walk through the stately galleries of the world, and their splendid furniture and array are as the tinsel armour and pasteboard goblets of a penny theatre; fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid. ”

“ That a man should go to the stake for an opinion, was as incomprehensible to him as that a priest or king should send him there for an opinion. He thought the persecuted and the persecutors fools about equally matched. He was easy-tempered and humane—in the hunting-field he could not bear the cry of a dying hare with composure—martyr-burning had consequently no attraction for such a man. His scepticism came into play, his melancholy humour, his sense of the illimitable which surrounds man's life, and which mocks, defeats, flings back his thought upon himself. ”

“ The portrait-painter is of all men the most beloved. You sit to him willingly, and put on your best looks. You are inclined to be pleased with his work, on account of the strong prepossession you entertain for his subject. To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation. It is an admirable excuse for egotism. You would not discourse on the falcon-like curve which distinguishes your nose, or the sweet serenity of your reposing lips, or the mildness of the eye that spreads a light over your countenance, in the presence of a fellow-creature for the whole world ”

“ When I first settled here, the ground around the house was sour moorland. I made the walk, planted the trees, built the moss-house, erected the sun-dial, brought home the rhododendrons and fed them with the mould which they love so well. I am the creator of every blossom, of every odour that comes and goes in the wind. The rustle of my trees is to my ear what his child's voice is to my friends the village doctor or the village clergyman. I know the genealogy of every tree and plant in my garden. I watch their growth as a father watches the growth of his children. ”

“ And that joy is the greatest which, while felt to be joy, can include the thought of death and clothe itself with that crowning pathos. And in the minds of thoughtful persons every joy does, more or less, with the crowning pathos clothe itself.
In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than the arrivals and departures of pleasure. If we find it in one place to-day, it is vain to seek it there to-morrow. You cannot lay a trap for it. It will fall into no ambuscade, concert it ever so cunningly. Pleasure has no logic; it never treads in its own footsteps. ”

“ Love and friendship are the discoveries of ourselves in others, and our delight in the recognition; and in men, as in books, we only know that, the parallel of which we have in ourselves. We know only that portion of the world which we have travelled over; and we are never a whit wiser than our own experiences. Imagination, the falcon, sits on the wrist of Experience, the falconer; she can never soar beyond the reach of his whistle, and when tired she must return to her perch. Our knowledge is limited by ourselves, and so also are our imaginations. ”

“ Every mystery is dissipated. The planet is familiar as the trodden pathway running between towns. We no longer gaze wistfully to the west, dreaming of the Fortunate Isles. We seek our wonders now on the ebbed sea-shore; we discover our new worlds with the microscope. Yet, for all that time has brought and taken away, I am glad to know that the vagabond sleeps in our blood, and awakes now and then. Overlay human nature as you please, here and there some bit of rock, or mound of aboriginal soil, will crop out with the wild-flowers growing upon it, sweetening the air. ”

“ Let him take up the most trivial subject, and it will lead him away to the great questions over which the serious imagination loves to brood,—fortune, mutability, death,—just as inevitably as the runnel, trickling among the summer hills, on which sheep are bleating, leads you to the sea; or as, turning down the first street you come to in the city, you are led finally, albeit by many an intricacy, out into the open country, with its waste places and its woods, where you are lost in a sense of strangeness and solitariness. ”

“ So far, then, as great writers—great poets, especially—are of imagination all compact—a peculiarity of mental constitution which makes a man go shares with every one he is brought into contact with; which makes him enter into Romeo's rapture when he touches Juliet's cheek among cypresses silvered by the Verona moonlight, and the stupor of the blinded and pinioned wretch on the scaffold before the bolt is drawn—so far as this special gift goes, I do not think the great poet,—and by virtue of it he is a poet,—is likely to be happier than your more ordinary mortal. ”

“ What does the murderer think when his eyes are forever blinded by the accursed nightcap? In what form did thought condense itself between the gleam of the lifted axe and the rolling of King Charles's head in the saw-dust? This kind of speculation may be morbid, but it is not necessarily so. All extremes of human experience touch us; and we have all the deepest personal interest in the experience of death. Out of all we know about dying we strive to clutch something which may break its solitariness, and relieve us by a touch of companionship. ”

“ The Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," in which we make the acquaintance of the pilgrims, is the ripest, most genial and humourous, altogether the most masterly thing which Chaucer has left us. In its own way, and within its own limits, it is the most wonderful thing in the language. The people we read about are as real as the people we brush clothes with in the street,—nay, much more real; for we not only see their faces, and the fashion and texture of their garments, we know also what they think, how they express themselves, and with what eyes they look out on the world. ”

“ Montaigne said the most familiar things in the finest way. Goldsmith could not be termed a thinker; but everything he touched he brightened, as after a month of dry weather, the shower brightens the dusty shrubbery of a suburban villa. The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new. Love is an old story enough, but in every generation it is re-born, in the downcast eyes and blushes of young maidens. ”

“ And this remote recognition of death may exist almost constantly in a man's mind, and give to his life keener zest and relish. His lights may burn the brighter for it, and his wines taste sweeter. For it is on the tapestry or a dim ground that the figures come out in the boldest relief and the brightest colour.
If we were to live here always, with no other care than how to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, life would be a very sorry business. It is immeasurably heightened by the solemnity of death. The brutes die even as we; but it is our knowledge that we have to die that makes us human. ”

“ He plays with death as Hamlet plays with Yorick's skull, and he reads the morals—strangely stern, often, for such fragrant lodging—which are folded up in the bosoms of roses. He has no pride, and is deficient in a sense of the congruity and fitness of things. He lifts a pebble from the ground, and puts it aside more carefully than any gem; and on a nail in a cottage-door he will hang the mantle of his thought, heavily brocaded with the gold of rhetoric. He finds his way into the Elysian fields through portals the most shabby and commonplace. ”

“ It has escaped into the world of the poet, and walks a love-flushed Romeo in immortal youth. We suppose that the Mary of fifty years since, the rose-bud of a girl that crazed our hearts, blossomed into the spouse of Jenkins, the stockbroker, and is now a grandmother. Not at all. She is Juliet leaning from the balcony, or Portia talking on the moonlight lawns at Belmont. There walk the shadows of our former selves. All that Time steals he takes thither; and to live in that world is to live in our lost youth, our lost generosities, illusions, and romances. ”

“ But Arden forest draws its sustenance from a poet's brain: the light that sleeps on its leafy pillows is "the light that never was on sea or shore." We but please and tantalise ourselves with beautiful dreams.
The children of the brain become to us actual existences, more actual, indeed, than the people who impinge upon us in the street, or who live next door. We are more intimate with Shakspeare's men and women than we are with our contemporaries, and they are, on the whole, better company. ”

“ The dead man is wise, but he is silent. We cannot wring his secret from him. We cannot interpret the ineffable calm which gathers on the rigid face. As a consequence, when our thought rests on death we are smitten with isolation and loneliness. We are without company on the dark road; and we have advanced so far upon it that we cannot hear the voices of our friends. It is in this sense of loneliness, this consciousness of identity and nothing more, that the terror of dying consists. And yet, compared to that road, the most populous thoroughfare of London or Pekin is a desert. ”

“ Those lovers who have never encountered the possibility of last embraces and farewells are novices in the passion. Sunset affects us more powerfully than sunrise, simply because it is a setting sun, and suggests a thousand analogies. A mother is never happier than when her eyes fill over her sleeping child, never does she kiss it more fondly, never does she pray for it more fervently; and yet there is more in her heart than visible red cheek and yellow curl; possession and bereavement are strangely mingled in the exquisite maternal mood, the one heightening the other. ”

“ Love of trees and plants is safe. You do not run risk in your affections. They are my children, silent and beautiful, untouched by any passion, unpolluted by evil tempers; for me they leaf and flower themselves. In autumn they put off their rich apparel, but next year they are back again, with dresses fair as ever; and—one can extract a kind of fanciful bitterness from the thought—should I be laid in my grave in winter, they would all in spring be back again, with faces a bright and with breaths as sweet, missing me not at all. ”

“ There is a cleverness in the world which seems to have neither father nor mother. It exists, but it is impossible to tell from whence it comes,—just as it is impossible to lift the shed apple-blossom of an orchard, and to discover, from its bloom and odour, to what branch it belonged. Such cleverness illustrates nothing: it is an anonymous letter. Look at it ever so long, and you cannot tell its lineage. It lives in the catalogue of waifs and strays. On the other hand, there are men whose every expression is characteristic, whose every idea seems to come out of a mould. ”

“ We are agitated by our passions, we busily pursue our ambitions, we are acquiring money or reputation, and all at once, in the centre of our desires, we discover the "Shadow feared of man." And so nature fools the poor human mortal evermore. When she means to be deadly, she dresses her face in smiles; when she selects a victim, she sends him a poisoned rose. There is no pleasure, no shape of good fortune, no form of glory in which death has not hid himself, and waited silently for his prey. ”

“ I am a Roman emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift Homer, and I shout with Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the unpeopled Syrian plains, the out-comings and in-goings of the patriarchs, Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob's guile, Esau's face reddened by desert sun-heat, Joseph's splendid funeral procession,—all these things I find within the boards of my Old Testament. What a silence in those old books as of a half-peopled world; what bleating of flocks; what green pastoral rest; what indubitable human existence! ”

“ The young man cools himself with a thought of the winding-sheet and the charnel, as the heated dancer cools himself on the balcony with the night-air. The young imagination plays with the idea of death, makes a toy of it, just as a child plays with edge-tools till once it cuts its fingers. The most lugubrious poetry is written by very young and tolerably comfortable persons. When a man's mood becomes really serious he has little taste for such foolery. The man who has a grave or two in his heart, does not need to haunt churchyards. The young poet uses death as an antithesis ”

“ The moon dances on a plump of spears, as the moss-troopers, by secret and desert paths, ride over into England to lift a prey, and the bale-fire on the hill gives the alarm to Cumberland. Men live and marry, and support wife and little ones by steel-jacket and spear; and the Flower of Yarrow, when her larder is empty, claps a pair of spurs in her husband's platter. A time of strife and foray, of plundering and burning, of stealing and reaving; when hate waits half a lifetime for revenge, and where difficulties are solved by the slash of a sword-blade. ”

“ Nature is his mistress, and he is continually making declarations of his love. When one thinks of ordinary occupations, how one envies him, flecking his oak-tree boll with sunlight, tinging with rose the cloud of the morning in which the lark is hid, making the sea's swift fringe of foaming lace outspread itself on the level sands, in which the pebbles gleam forever wet. The landscape painter's memory is inhabited by the fairest visions,—dawn burning on the splintered peaks that the eagles know, while the valleys beneath are yet filled with uncertain light ”

“ From the nature of the case, our happiness, such as in its degree it has been, lives in memory. We have not the voice itself; we have only its echo. We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once. And while in the very heart and structure of the happy moment there lurked an obscure consciousness of death, the memory in which past happiness dwells is always a regretful memory. This is why the tritest utterance about the past, youth, early love, and the like, has always about it an indefinable flavour of poetry, which pleases and affects. ”

“ Of the labour, the weariness, the self-distrust, the utter despondency of the great writer, we know nothing. Then, for the attainment of mere happiness or contentment, any high faculty of imagination is a questionable help. Of course imagination lights the torch of joy, it deepens the carmine on the sleek cheek of the girl, it makes wine sparkle, makes music speak, gives rays to the rising sun. But in all its supreme sweetnesses there is a perilous admixture of deceit, which is suspected even at the moment when the senses tingle keenliest. ”

“ And yet some subtile recognition of the fact of death runs constantly through the warp and woof of the most ordinary human existence. And this recognition does not always terrify. The spectre has the most cunning disguises, and often when near us we are unaware of the fact of proximity. Unsuspected, this idea of death lurks in the sweetness of music; it has something to do with the pleasures with which we behold the vapours of morning; it comes between the passionate lips of lovers; it lives in the thrill of kisses. "An inch deeper, and you will find the emperor." ”

“ His writings are as full of transformations as a pantomime or a fairy tale. His arid wastes lead up to glittering palaces, his banqueting-halls end in a dog-hutch. He begins an essay about trivialities, and the conclusion is in the other world. And the peculiar character of his writing, like the peculiar character of all writing which is worth anything, arises from constitutional turn of mind. He is constantly playing at fast and loose with himself and his reader. He mocks and scorns his deeper nature; and, like Shakspeare in Hamlet, says his deepest things in a jesting way. ”

“ It is strange how important the poorest human being is to himself! how he likes to double back on his experiences, to stand on the place he has stood on before, to meet himself face to face, as it were! I go to the great city in which my early life was spent, and I love to indulge myself in this whim. The only thing I care about is that portion of the city which is connected with myself. I don't think this passion of reminiscence is debased by the slightest taint of vanity. ”