Francis William Lauderdale Adams

“ I had forgotten altogether about Hamilton and Malmesbury.—What business on earth had I with running about seeing that Hamiltons and Malmesburies sent up things? Why not use a servant? Or the post? The post is one of the greatest institutions of our country. There was not any need for such frantic haste. Whereas there were creatures, like that girl with the pince-nez and walking stick, who dawdled away their whole lives! ”

“ I have not told you before, how bitter that moment was to me. To turn back at Mount Nebo, within sight of Canaan, into the sandy desert, so hot and waterless!—And as I turned, verily my anguish shamed me out of my manliness to play the woman. ”

“ The beetle-browed prude told me about her husband's travels: the cavalry officer about his own. (The lady he had taken in to dinner was a philanthropist, very distinguished, very loquacious. but unfortunately deaf. She and the cavalry officer soon gave one another up: the cavalry officer, for me, the female philanthropist for a course of lectures to a weak-eyed man on her right—subject, parochial rates, I think.) The officer varied the conversation once, by remarking that Darwin did not appreciate the spirit of Nature, so leading the prude into a disquisition on Eternal Love ”

“ I wish I was! I wish this world had never been made. I wish I had never been born, and then I shouldn't have been plagued with all these things. . . . No; this world is not much of a place to be happy in! ”

“ Brooke's, where I had met some, what I called, 'travellers':
'"Travellers" are an aggravating tribe. They seem to expect you to know their books better than they do themselves: to pretend that no one else ever went where they went, or, if some one else undeniably did go,—then that that some one else went the wrong way, came back the wrong way, and made rather a fool than otherwise of himself every bit of the way! People have no business to be active monomaniacs: passive ones, as much as you like: I see no harm in that. ”

“ No one could help liking the man's earnestness: an earnestness that had something of the tenderness-inspiring in it. It did not matter that the aim of this earnestness was not altogether apparent to you. You saw the effect: the effect was beautiful, earnestness and honesty welded together, and you 'liked' it. What matter about the cause?
It was in a hiunour of this sort that, some days later, I sat with him after dinner in the library, he smoking a cigar, I thinking about things. ”

“ Such are they whom the world calls 'geniuses' and their friends 'brutes,' for no sacrifice is too great for these precious empty dreams of theirs—not excluding the dreamers' lives. It angers me to hear people erecting special codes of morality for such men. Because a man is dubbed 'genius,' is he also to be dubbed demi-god, and allowed to pick and choose from the laws of the land, which he will be so good as to obey and which he won't?—Give up thinking that you can do anything, and there is a chance of your doing something. ”

“ I asked, but in a purposeless sort of way, for it seemed as if he expected me to ask for an explanation of his "jam afterwards."
'"You will be more contented, less self-conscious, a better member of society generally: I mean, more ready to put yourself out to talk to 'fools,' less eager to find fault with wiser people than yourself. In a word, more healthy!" ”

“ But men are made up of such inconsistencies. I, for example, am shudderingly afraid of small-pox. Yet I have been through a cholera epidemic: nursed diphtheritic cases; known cancer, and what not besides.'
'King Alfred used to pray that God's will might be done in all things, but that he should prefer not to die of a loathsome disease. I should perhaps be afraid of such things too, if it wasn't that ...' I paused. ”

“ I heard the officer repeating his remark about Darwin to another prude (square-browed: lifeless, combed-back hair, slow eyes, and an altogether suggestiveness of "shoulder arms") just behind us. My own particular prude seemed for some time (that is, till I grew dreamy and inattentive) to have eyes, and I should say a good many tongues, for me only: then she carried me off, tripping over her spasmodic train, to her dear, dear friend Mrs. ”