Gilbert Parker

“ The price it pays for the revelation is a hopeless love informed by temptation, but lifted away from ruinous elements by self-renunciation, to end with the inevitable parting, poignant and permanent, a task of the soul finished and the toll of the journey of understanding paid. ”

“ And say, "Ah me! ah me!" to fallow crime?
Nay, Art serves Truth, and Truth with Titan blows,
Strikes fearless at all evil that it knows.
IN THEE MY ART In thee is all my art; from thee I draw
The substance of my dreams, the waking plan
Of practised thought; I can no measure scan,
But thou work'st in me like eternal law.
If I were rich in goodly title deeds
Of broad estate, won from posterity;
If from decaying Time I snatched a see
Richer than prelates pray for with their beads ”

“ They who by their souls' travailing have brought
Us nearer to the wonder of the suns.
Yet, who can stay the passage of the stars?
Who can prevail against the thunder-sound?
The wire that flashes lightning to the ground
Diverts, but not its potency debars.
So, men may strike quick stabs at Caesar's worth,—
They only make his life an endless force,
'Scaped from its penthouse, flashing through the earth,
And 'whelming those who railed about his Gorse.
Men's moods disturb not those born truly great:
They know their end; they can afford to wait. ”

“ In any case, it is now too late to try and disabuse the minds of those who care for the little piece of artistry, and since 1894, when it was published, I have matured sufficiently in life's academy not to be too unduly sensitive either as to the merit or demerit of my work. There is, after all, an unlovable kind of vanity in acute self-criticism —as though it mattered deeply to the world whether one ever wrote anything ”

“ The world has drunk deep of wonderful literature, and all that I can do is make a small brew with a little flavour of my own; but it still could get on very well indeed with the old staple and matured vintages were I never to write at all.
The King—Whence art thou, sir?
Gilfaron—My Lord, I know not well. ”

“ The six sonnets in italics, beginning with 'The Bride', and ending with 'Annunciation', have nothing to do with the story further than to show two phases of the youth's mind before it was shaken by speculation, plunged into the sadness of doubt and apprehension, and before it had found the love which was to reveal it to itself, transform the character, and give new impulse and direction to personal force and individual sense. These were written when I was twenty and twenty-one years of age, and the sonnet sequence of 'A Lover's Diary' was begun when I was twenty- three. ”

“ Such material story as there is, apart from the spiritual history embodied in the sonnets, seems more visible now, and the reader has a clearer revelation of a young, aspiring, candid mind shadowed by stern conventions of thought, dogma, and formula, but breaking loose from the environment which smothered it. ”