“ We should be accused of being 'unnatural.' Does no one speak beautifully any more, then, even in real life? Are the nerve-centres so shattered in the modern anatomy that no connection is established between emotions and the musical sense? Does an exquisite mood no longer reflect itself in our voice, in our vocabulary? Does no lover rise to eloquence in the presence of his Adored? If that is the case, surely we now speak unnaturally, and it should be the duty of literature to restore our health! Nor need such speech in fiction float clear away from solid ground. ”

“ Night comes at last, and weariness droops upon the flesh. Enough! Even the spirit's cry finds a pause. Enough, enough! The wide world suddenly spreads so vast that it overwhelms and frightens; there is something pitiless in the reach of the unbounded sky. Then, as fast as they can, the lagging feet make for a point on the hillside where the eyes can command the valley, and swiftly, eagerly flies the glance to one dear accustomed goal. A white house nestled among the trees,—that is all, yet it thrills the heart with a potent summons which mountain-peaks and sunsets do not know. ”

“ This splendid optimism of people on Broadway, in the Subway and in the shops and offices—is it really a sign of high spiritual courage, or is it just lack of sensibility? Do we find it easy to keep a stiff upper lip, to buck up, to never say die, because we are brave men, or simply because we lack the sensitiveness and the imagination to react to pain? It may be even worse than that. It may be part of our commercial gift for window-dressing, for putting up a good front.
Sometimes I feel that Williams has no right to be walking down Broadway on business when there is a stricken child at home. ”

“ The heritage of the language is still ours, the birthright of our noble English tongue. Simply, we do not dare to let ourselves go. We seem tortured with the modern blight of self-consciousness; and while the cheaper magazines are almost blatant in their unblushing self-puffery, they are none the less cravenly submissive to what they deem popular demand, and turn their backs on literature, on style, as something abhorrent to a race which has been fed on the English Bible for three hundred years. Their ideal of a prose style now seems to consist of a series of staccato yips. ”

“ But not for anything would one go out, not for anything would one leave this glowing, brooding, protecting indoors which one has regained. After a while, one goes upstairs and lays one's self in the safe white bed in one's own room. The windows are open to the night, but solid walls are all round about; and, before the sleepily closing eyes, gleam one's own peculiar cherished belongings in the creeping moonlight. Into the very heart of one's life one has returned at the close of the day, and there one goes to sleep. ”

“ More and more we are stripped of the humanities; the incredulity of science in contemplating philosophy, art, literature, as part of the educational curriculum, is full of menace. There has never been, I think, in the history of the civilized world, a time when people were so anxious to cast off the past. In our eager Marathon race of material and physical progress we want to go as lightly equipped as possible. The æroplane carries small luggage; our light modern mind is ever ready to throw overboard even its precious heritage, in its eagerness for swift flight. ”

“ Good-natured when dangling from the strap in the Subway, good-natured in front of baseball bulletins on Park Row, good-natured in the face of so much oppression and injustice, where is the supposed cruelty of the 'mob'? I am ready to affirm on oath that the mob is not vindictive, that it is not cruel. It may be a bit sharp-tongued, fickle, a bit mischievous, but in the heart of the crowd there is no evil passion. The evil comes from the leaders, the demagogues, the professional distorters of right thinking and right feeling. ”

“ Has not pride given way to humility, reticence to glibness, class-consciousness to a wild democracy, the code of manners to an uncouth unworldliness, and honor in the old sense to a burning passion for reform—'any old' reform? Do not these men lead us into the heterogeneous company of the unclassed of both sexes—and ask us to look upon them as saints in motley? Has not the world of fiction changed in the last twenty years? The hero in old days sometimes fell foul of the law by getting into debt. ”

“ When all the world is askew, dibbling in seedlings in straight rows is a wonderful solace. Why do so many women treat domesticity as drudgery? Its infinite variety, so unlike the monotonous tasks of men, often wearies the mind, but like Chesterton I do not see how it can narrow it. And socialism, with its cry of armchairs for workingmen! Armchairs, as Creighton nobly says, will bring no lasting happiness; but to quicken a human being, even one's self, into a sense of the meaning of his life and destiny, that is a real happiness. ”

“ But why should we make steam and electricity serve our greed only? Why use them chiefly to darken the world and make life a horror? Dare you affirm that we women and our demands are not at the very centre of the tragic tangle of modern living? Isn't all this horrible speeding-up of business largely an outgrowth of our exactions? What do men do business for, anyhow, except to get us what we want! ”

“ But beyond the argument for cadenced prose as an aid to illusion, employed in the proper places,—that is, where intensity of imagery or feeling can benefit by it,—is the higher plea for sheer lingual beauty for its own sake. Shall realism preclude all other effects of artistic creation? Because the men on our streets, the women in our homes, talk sloppily, shall all our books be written in their idiom, all our stage characters reproduce their commonplaceness, nearly all our magazines and newspapers give no attention to the graces of style? ”

“ The imagination is the miracle-working power in human nature; through it alone can the human soul come to its own. Only that which is fine and high can feed it aright, while baseness can make of it a destructive tool of terrible power. As I think back to childhood, I can remember the devastating effect that one tale of cruelty had upon my mind, haunting me by day in vivid pictures, turning my dreams to horror, and making me, while the obsession lasted, believe that the world of grown folk must be all alike cruel. ”

“ Being deaf is merely to enjoy some of the advantages that the society to prevent unnecessary noises seeks to confer on a normal public. We admire a beautiful face and then add, 'But how she must hate to grow old; a tragedy of the mirror that we homely souls are spared.' All my life I envied persons with straight noses till I began to observe that with age the straight nose droops into a beak, whereas the youthful tip-tilt and concavity kind straightens its end to a fair classicism. Thus others than the Vicar of Wakefield draw upon content for the deficiencies of fortune. ”

“ I have walked farther than I intended, and I am soft from lack of exercise, and tired. The romance of the crowd has disappeared. Romance cannot survive that short passage of Longacre Square, where the art of the theatre and of the picture-postcard flourish in an atmosphere impregnated with gasolene. As I glance into the windows of the automobile salesrooms and catch my own reflection in the enamel of Babylonian limousines I find myself thinking all at once of the children at home. They expand and fill up the horizon. Broadway disappears. ”

“ I tell you, the Greeks and Romans did not make a religion of the hearthstone; they merely recognized the religion that the hearthstone is. Under that quiet roof I have learned that it is a woman's business to take stones and make them bread. Only she can make our surroundings live and nourish us.
'Beyond the need for bread, a woman's needs are two; deeper than all cravings save the mother's passion, firm-rooted in our endless past, is the heart-hunger. The trees that sweep my chimney have their roots at the world's core! The flowers in my dooryard have grown there for a thousand years! ”

“ No leader and helper of men was ever bedewed with tears. The world is old, and the world is wide. Of what use are we in its tumultuous life, if we do not know its joys, its griefs, its high emotions, its call to courage, and the echo of the laughter of the ages?
Perhaps the only literature of poverty (I use the word 'literature' in a purely courteous sense) which was ever written for the poor is that amazing issue of tracts, Village Politics, Tales for the Common People, and scores of similar productions, which a hundred years ago were let loose upon rural England. ”

“ It is unquestionably an eighty-dollar band. We begin to believe in dachshunds.
To these supposedly cheerful strains the gentlemen stream into the drawing-room. They beam repletely. They tell us what a fine luncheon it was. They are eloquent about it. All the conditions of their entertainment were ideal, they would have us believe. They imply that we are mighty lucky, in that our men can provide us with such a luxurious existence. They smile with majestic benignity at these fair, but frivolous pensioners on masculine bounty. American women are petted, helpless dolls, anyway. ”

“ Never has there been among the feminine young more scientific talk about sex, and never among the feminine young such a scientific distrust of it. Before a young woman suspects that she wants to marry a young man, she has probably discussed with him, exhaustively, the penal code, white slavery, eugenics, and race-suicide. The miracle—the everlasting miracle of Nature—is that she should want, in these circumstances, to marry him at all. She probably does not, unless his views have been wholly to her satisfaction. And with those views, what has the perpetual glory of the peacock's tail to do? ”

“ The nervous pace of lower Broadway slackens to the steady, patient tramp of a host. It is an army of women, with here and there a flying detachment of the male.
On the faces of the men the day's toil has written its record even as on the women, but in a much coarser hand. Fatigue has beaten down the soul of these men into brutish indifference, but in the women it has drawn fine the flesh only to make it more eloquent of the soul. ”

“ General Harrison was akin to the Covenanters who bore both Bible and sword into battle. His eminence in the law was due to his deep learning in its history and philosophy. Short of stature, and without grace of person,—with a voice pitched rather high,—he was a remarkably interesting and persuasive speaker. If I may so put it, his political speeches were addressed as to a trial judge rather than to a jury, his appeal being to reason and not to passion or prejudice. He could, in rapid flights of campaigning, speak to many audiences in a day without repeating himself. ”

“ One afternoon's reading of Spenser made the boy Keats a poet; who, knowing the potency of brief experience in the flush of youth, can doubt the lasting wrong wrought again and again by the sudden shock of contact with things evil?
Many images of wrong must of necessity come to the young; let them not be multiplied in our feverish and morbid fashion of to-day. Above all, let them be crowded out by constant suggestion of noble images and noble thought, which will work both consciously and subconsciously, shaping the dream when the dreamer is least aware. ”

“ Perhaps it is because of the fierce democracy of it all. The crush, the enforced intimacies of physical contact, the feeling that a man's natural condition is to push and be pushed, to shove ahead when the opportunity offers and to take it like a man when no chance presents itself—that is equality. A seat in the Subway is like the prizes of life for which men have fought in these United States. You struggle, you win or lose. If the other man wins there is no envy ”

“ When two men meet on Broadway the spirit of optimism strikes fire. We begin by asking each other what the good word is. We take it for granted that neither of us has anything but a chronicle of victory and courage to relate. What other word but the good word is tolerable in the lexicon of living, upstanding men? Failure is only for the dead. Surrender is for the man with yellow in his nature. So Williams and I pay our acknowledgments to this best of possible worlds. I give Williams the good word. ”

“ We are much in the position of a village improvement society which has pulled down a bridge because it is rotting, and is impotent to build another and a better. We have invested our national all in wrecking machinery, and have nothing left for constructive tools. It is said that in our explosive setting forth of civic and national wrong-doing, we are all too prone to stop with the explosion, as if mere knowledge of these things would set them right. Mere knowledge never yet set anything right; only the ceaselessly active, creative will can fashion a world of law out of chaos. ”

“ Even a true poet like Francis Thompson laments that the poverty exalted by Christ should have been cast down from her high caste.
These are the words of one to whom the London gutters were for years a home, and whose strengthless manhood lay inert under a burden of pain he had no courage to lift. Yet never was sufferer more shone upon by kindness than was Francis Thompson; never was man better fitted to testify to the goodness of a bad world. ”

“ Here, if the life is dull, you can be dull too, and no great harm done. (Going off into a passionate dream.) But your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colors in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. ”