Helen Hunt Jackson

“ A shining-beached crescent of country facing to the sunset, and rising higher and higher to the east till it becomes mountain, is the county of Ayrshire, fair and famous among the southern Scotch highlands. To a sixty-mile measure by air, between its north and south promontories, it stretches a curving coast of ninety; and when Robert Burns strolled over its breezy uplands, he saw always beautiful and mysterious silver lines of land thrusting themselves out into the mists of the sea, pointing to far-off island peaks, seeming sometimes to bridge and sometimes to wall vistas ending only in sky. ”

“ The face is one, once seen, never to be forgotten; full of spirituality and tenderness and unutterable pathos; the mouth and chin so delicately sensitive that one marvels how such a soul could have been capable of heroic endurance of hardship; the forehead and eyes strong, and radiant with quenchless purpose, but filled with that solemn, yearning, almost superhuman sadness, which has in all time been the sign and seal on the faces of men born to die for the sake of their fellows. It is the face of Father Junipero Serra, the first founder of Franciscan missions in South California. ”

“ A little pathway of mossy stones, past an old boat-house, on whose thatched roof flowering grasses and a young birch-tree were waving, leads up from the water to the one road on the island. Wild pansies, white clover, and dandelions, tinkling water among ferns and mosses, along the roadsides, made the way beautiful; low hills rose on either side, softly wooded with firs and birches feathery as plumes; in the meadows, peasant men and women making hay,—the women in red jackets and white blouses, a 242 delight to the eye. ”

“ To sail up this fjord in the sunset is to wind through devious lanes walled with these jewels, and to look off, over and above them, to fields of purple and gray and green, islands on islands on islands, to the right and to the left, with the same jewel-walled lanes running east and west and north and south among them; the sky will stream with glowing colors from horizon to horizon, and the glorious silence will be broken by no harsher sound than the low lapsing of waters and the soft whirr of gray gulls' wings. ”

“ The wall is not over two feet wide; and here they stand, lean over, jostle, slip by to right and left of each other, and run up and down in their eager haste to catch the eye of one auctioneer, or to get first speech with another. The wharf is crowded with women,—an army in blue, two hundred, three hundred, at a time; white caps bobbing, elbows thrusting, shrill voices crying, fiery blue eyes shining, it is a sight worth going to Scotland for. If one has had an affection for Christie Johnstone, it is a delightful return of his old admiration for her. ”

“ The half-day's sail from Stavanger to Bergen is all like this, except that after one turns southward into the Bergen Fjord the mysterious islanded shores press closer, and the hill shores back of them rise higher, so that expectancy and wonder deepen moment by moment, till the moment of landing on Bergen's water rim. "Will there be carriages at the wharf?" we had asked of the terrible stewardess who had tyrannized over our ship for two days, like a French Revolution fishwoman. "Carriages!" she cried, with her arms akimbo. "The streets in Bergen are so steep carriages can't drive down them. ”

“ This would not be hard to be believed by one who has sailed two days and two nights in their labyrinths. They are a more distinctive feature in the beauty of Norway's seaward face than even her majestic mountain ranges. They have as much and as changing beauty of color as those, and, added to the subtle and exhaustless beauty of changing color, they have the still subtler charm of that mysterious combination of rest and restlessness, stillness and motion, solidity and evanescence, which is the dower of all islands, and most of all of the islands of outer seas. ”

“ I am not over-easy to be stirred by women's fair looks. Seldom I see a woman's face that gives me unalloyed pleasure. Faces are half-terrifying things to one who studies them, such paradoxical masks are they; only one half mask, and the other half bared secrets of a lifetime. Their mere physical beauty, however great it may be, is so underlaid and overlaid by tokens and traces and scars of things in which the flesh and blood of it have played part that a fair face can rarely be more than half fair. ”

“ Even out to the very ocean edge the groves run, their purples and greens melting into the purples and greens of the sea when it is dark and when it is sunny blue,—making harmonious lines of color, leading up from it to the soft grays of the olive and the bright greens of the walnut orchards and wheat-fields. When the almond trees are in bloom, the eucalyptus belts are perhaps most superb of all, with their dark spears and plumes waving above and around the white and rosy acres. ”

“ These men were there by hundreds, each bringing a green bough, or a fern, or a flower; they waited humbly till all others had left the grave, then crowded up, and threw in, each man, the only token he had been rich enough to bring. The grave was filled to the brim; and it is not irreverent to say that to Ole Bull, in heaven, there could come no gladder memory of earth than that the last honors paid him there were wild leaves and flowers of Norway, laid on his body by the loving hands of Norway peasants. ”

“ He is over sixty years of age, and his snowy beard and his hair have to be dyed to the red hue which is desired for the crafty Judas's face. From the time when, in Simon's house, he stands by, grumbling at the waste of the precious ointment poured by Mary Magdalene on the feet of Jesus, to the last moment of his wretched existence, when he is seen wandering in a desolate wilderness, about to take his own life in his remorse and despair, Judas' acting is superb. Face, attitudes, voice, action,—all are grandly true to the character, and marvellously full of life. ”

“ A pair of eyes too blue for gray, too gray for blue; brown hair as dark as hair can be, being brown and not black; a face fine without beauty, gentle but firm; a look appealing, and yet full of a certain steadfastness, which one can see would be changed to fortitude at once if there were need; a voice soft, low, and of a rich fulness, in which even Norwegian sks flow melodiously and broken English becomes music,—this is a little, these are a few features, of the portrait of Sanna, all that can be told to any one not knowing Sanna herself. ”

“ FRITHIOF AND INGEBORG.
Two trees growed bold and silent: never before the north never seen such beauties; they growed nicely in the garden.
The one growed up with the strongth of the oak; and the stem was as the handle of the spear, but the crown shaked in the wind like the top on the helmet.
But the other one growed like a rose,—like a rose when the winter just is going away; but the spring what stands in its buds still in dreams childly is smiling. ”

“ At every mission were walled gardens with waving palms, sparkling fountains, groves of olive trees, broad vineyards, and orchards of all manner of fruits; over all, the sunny, delicious, winterless California sky.
More than mortal, indeed, must the Franciscans have been, to have been able, under these conditions, to preserve intact the fervor and spirit of self-abnegation and deprivation inculcated by the rules of their order. ”

“ Here were green hills and slopes and trees, and a bright yellow church, shaped like a blancmange mould in three pyramid-shaped cones, each smaller than the one below.
"Here is the finest fruit orchard in all Scandinavia," said Sanna, pointing to a pretty place just out of the town, where fields rose one above the other in terraces on south-facing slopes, covered thick with orchards. "It belongs to an acquainted with me: but she must sell it. She is a widow, and she cannot take the care to herself." ”

“ But for the Passion Play the great world had never found Oberammergau out, perhaps; yet it might well be sought for itself. It lies 2,600 feet above the sea, at the head of 385 a long stretch of meadow lands, which the River Ammer keeps green for half the year,—at the head of these, and in the gateway of one of the most beautiful walled valleys of the Alps. The Ammer is at once its friend and foe; in summer a friend, but malicious in spring, rising suddenly after great rains or thaws, and filling the valley with a swift sea, by which everything is in danger of being swept away. ”

“ Down this precipice into the Nerodal Valley leap two grand fosses, the Stalheimfos and the Salvklevfos; roaring in ceaseless thunder, filling the air, and drenching the valley with spray. Tiny grass-grown spaces between the bowlders and the loops of the road had all been close mowed; spaces which looked too small for the smallest reaping-hook to swing in were yet close shorn, and the little handfuls of hay hung up drying on hand's-breadths of fence set up for the purpose. Even single blades of grass are too precious in Norway to be wasted. ”

“ In fact, they are far more graceful afloat than on ground: on the land they shuffle and walk in a bent and toil-worn attitude, the result of perpetual carrying of loads on their backs; but they bend to their oars with ease and freedom, and wheel and turn and shoot and back their little skiffs with a dexterity which leaves no room for doubt that they can do anything they choose on water. It would not have astonished me, any day, to see a Norwegian coming towards me in two boats at once, one foot in each boat, walking on the water in them, as a man walks on snow in snow-shoes. ”

“ The sheep ranches are usually desolate places: a great stretch of seemingly bare lands, with a few fenced corrals, blackened and foul-smelling; the home and out-buildings clustered together in a hollow or on a hill-side where there is water; the less human the neighborhood the better.
The loneliness of the life is, of itself, a salient objection to the industry. Of this the great owners need know nothing; they can live where they like. But for the small sheepmen, the shepherds, and, above all, the herders, it is a terrible life,—how terrible is shown by the frequency of insanity among herders. ”

“ An indescribable gloom settles on Gudvangen with nightfall. The black waters of the fjord chafing monotonously at the base of the black mountains; the sky black also, and looking farther off than sky ever looked before, walled into a strip, like the valley beneath it; hemmed in, forsaken, doomed, and left seems Gudvangen. What hold life can have on a human being kept in such a spot it is hard to imagine. Yet we found three very old women hobnobbing contentedly there in a cave of a hut. ”

“ Her clear olive skin, soft brown eyes, delicate sensitive nostrils, and broad smiling mouth, are all of the Spanish madonna type; and when her low brow is bound, as is often her wont, by turban folds of soft brown or green gauze, her face becomes a picture indeed. She is the young wife of a gray-headed Mexican señor, of whom—by his own most gracious permission—I shall speak by his familiar name, Don Antonio. Whoever has the fortune to pass as a friend across the threshold of this house finds himself transported, as by a miracle, into the life of a half-century ago. ”