John Wilson Townsend

“ Do you know when and where it was that satire virtually ceased to exist in English literature? It was at the birthplace and with the birth of Charles Darwin. From Darwin's time, from the peak on which he stood, a long slope of English literature sinks backward and downward toward the past; and on that shadowy slope stand somewhere the fierce satirists of English letters. Last of them all, and standing near where Darwin stood, is the great form of Thackeray. All his life he sought for perfection in human character and never found it. ”

“ It came nearer and became plainer—tonk-tonk-tonk; then the tonks all running together briskly.
A cowbell—that was it; but why did it seem to come from overhead, from up in the sky, like? And why did it shift so abruptly from one quarter to another—from left to right and back again to left? And how was it that the clapper seemed to strike so fast? Not even the breachiest of breachy young heifers could be expected to tinkle a cowbell with such briskness. The squire's eye searched the earth and the sky, his troubled mind giving to his eye a quick and flashing scrutiny. ”

“ Popular opinion, blind perhaps to the qualities of art as art, caring nothing about the more elusive charms of verse and prose, is quick to detect the presence or absence of a vital relationship between literature and humanity. Literary art voices life and gives life. The higher the art the more effectively does it fill the onlooker with a sense of life, personal and racial, dignified, wholesome, inexhaustible. Apparently it is the ideal within the real that becomes ever more manifest in the course of the evolution of literature. ”

“ The stagnation of development that follows where competition ceases, or, on the other hand, the gradual and insistent reduction of our tariff laws to a basis where the American manufacturer must meet honest competition, where he must develop his business along the best and most economic lines, where when he fights at home to control his market he is forging the way in the economic development of his business to extend his trade in the markets of the world. In my judgment, the future growth of our great industries lies beyond the seas. ”

“ It is like death to me to know I will never accomplish the things you set before me, and be the man you wanted me to be. I wish I had never laid eyes on Beldora. I have agonized and battled and tried to give her up; but she is too strong for me. I can fight no longer with fate. It would be better if women like Beldora never was created. She has cost the life of one boy, the liberty of another, and now my future. But it had to be.
Respectfully yours,
Howard. ”

“ No other State ever fought so well. Kansas was for freedom. She won, and the glory of it is that the victory gave liberty to America. That is why we maintain that Kansas history stands alone in interest and importance in American annals.
The history of a State is a faithful account of the events of its formation and development. If the account is set out in sufficient detail there will be preserved the fine delineations of the emotions which moved the people. These emotions arise out of the experiences of the people. And the pioneers fix the lines of their experiences. ”

“ You are more beautiful than Julia was at the height of her beauty. You are more beautiful than your mother was—"
Doctor Alvin's voice echoed mournfully as if he were calling upon the dead.
"Susan, you have only to look upon men to conquer them. You can achieve with a gesture what artists accomplish with a masterpiece. What can artists do, other than quicken the pulse of sluggard humanity? But, Susan—God guide your power—you will make blood boil, heads reel, hearts throb until they burst, if so you will it. Art—artists! There is no need of you studying art. Artists will study you. ”

“ Is not philosophy, at times, resignation in delirium? The enthusiastic are ridiculed as being self-conceited; the patient condemned for having no heart. We stigmatize them as idle whose natures are toiling the noblest toil of all, for not rarely do thought-gods drift through a spell of idleness; a butterfly-fancy may breed a spirit that turns the way of an age's career; there are sleeps that are awakenings; awakenings, sleeps; none so worthless as many who are busy all the time. ”

“ To humans the buzzard pays a deeper meed of respect—he hangs aloft longer; but in the end he comes. No scavenger shark, no carrion crab, has chambered more grisly secrets in his digestive processes than this big charnel bird. Such is the way of the buzzard.
The squire missed his afternoon nap, a thing that had not happened in years. He stayed on the front gallery and kept count. Those moving distant black specks typified uneasiness for the squire—not fear exactly, or panic or anything akin to it, but a nibbling, nagging kind of uneasiness. ”

“ All are weak and beggarly as over against the almightiness of heredity, the omniprepotence of the transmitted germ-plasma. Let this be amerced of its ancient rights, let it be shorn in some measure of its exceeding weight of ancestral glory, let it be soiled in its millenial purity and integrity, and nothing shall ever restore it; neither wealth, nor culture, nor science, nor art, nor morality, nor religion—not even Christianity itself. ”

“ Of all the great powers that were yielded to the Federal Government by the States when they adopted the Constitution of our country, the one indispensable to the administration of public affairs is the right to levy and collect taxes. Without the exercise of that power we could not maintain an army and navy; we could not establish the courts of the land; the government would fail to perform its function if the power to tax were taken away from it. The power to tax carries with it the power to destroy, and it is, therefore, a most dangerous governmental power as well as a most necessary one. ”

“ When the three meet there will be for the earth one whiteness and silence—rest.
A great time had passed—how great no one knew; there was none to measure it.
It was twilight and it was snowing. On a steep mountainside, near its bald summit, thousands of feet above the line that any other living thing had ever crossed, stood two glorious fir trees, strongest and last of their race. They had climbed out of the valley below to this lone height, and there had so rooted themselves in rock and soil that the sturdiest gale had never been able to dislodge them ”

“ The dramas as a whole are audacious in plot and vigorous in characterization. In the handling of the blank verse, in the witty scenes of the sub-plots, in the splendor of the phrasing, in the strong undercurrent of reflection, and, above all, in their spiritual uplift and noble emotion, these dramas give evidence of a remarkably gifted playwright who not only possesses a deep feeling for art at its highest and best, but who also has command of all the varied resources of dramatic expression. ”

“ Hewlett's women, like Hardy's, are stray angels, but like Meredith's they are creatures of the chase. And, note the difference from Meredith!—this, according to the gospel of Mr. Hewlett, is as it should be.
Since it is woman's proper fate to be loved, it would seem to be impossible for Mr. Hewlett to write a story in which there is not some romantic love interest. And in each case there is a stoop on the part of one. The stoop may be happy or the reverse, but it is there. He recurs to the idea again and again, but each time with a difference that prevents monotony. ”

“ The thing so dreadful to overcome was that I have a body like a great Dane. It would not have hurt a writer, a painter, even a singer, so much, but we of the drama are so dependent upon the shape of our bodies. Then, my face is like a dog or a horse or a cat—all these I have been likened to. Then I was slow to learn repression. This a part of culture, I guess—breeding. Mine is a lineage of Kentucky poor white trash, who knows, but a speck of 'nigger'? ”

“ Cawein is, of course, a poet of Nature, a landscape poet in particular who paints every color on the palette into his work. Had he been an artist he would have exhausted all colors conceived thus far by man, and would fain have originated new ones. There are literally hundreds of his poems in which every line is as surely a stroke as if done with the brush of a painter. Color, color, is his shibboleth-scheme, and he who would woo Nature in her richest robes may read Cawein and be content. ”

“ Up on the windswept plateaus, in the boundless stretch of the grasslands and the waterless tracts of the desert, where he roams with his flocks from pasture to pasture and oasis to oasis, where life knows much hardship but escapes the grind of drudgery, where the watching of grazing herds gives him leisure for contemplation, and the wide-ranging life a big horizon, his ideas take on a certain gigantic simplicity; religion becomes monotheism, God becomes one, unrivalled like the sand of the desert, and the grass of the steppe, stretching on and on without break or change. ”

“ But there is no nobler or more eloquent way in which a State can set forth its annals than by memorializing its great dead. The flag of a nation is its hope; its monuments are its memories. But it is also true that the flag of a country is its memory, and that its monuments are its hopes. ”

“ From the first it had been, in the nature of things, perfectly patent to every member of the party gathered at Grantleigh for [Pg 312] the shooting that Tompkins' bride cared not a whit for Tompkins—which, if one happened to know the man, was scarcely a matter for surprise.
Tompkins, though a good fellow on the whole, was an unmitigated idiot. Not a mere insignificant unit in the world's noble army of fools, but a fool so conspicuous and of so infinite a variety as to be at all times the cynosure of the general gaze. ”

“ If you should start from your homes and travel northward, after a while you would find that everything is steadily changing: the air grows colder, living things begin to be left behind, those that remain begin to look white, the music of the earth begins to die out; you think no more of color and joy and song. ”

“ When we cease to have competition at home and the law prohibits competition from abroad by protecting profits, there is no relief for the consumer except to cry out for government regulation. To my mind, there is no more reason or justice in the government attempting to protect the profits of the manufacturers and producers of this country than here would be to protect the profits of the merchant or the lawyer, the banker or the farmer, or the wages of the laboring man. ”

“ It is a pleasant mixture of cosmopolitan and mediaeval, blending a touch of geniality which adds much to its charm. The people are happier, perhaps it would be best to say more smiling, in Bologna than farther north. If one can be reconciled to the incongruity of living in a hotel that was a fifteenth century palace overlooking the solemn tombs of jurists, and then stepping to the corner for a twentieth century electric car, he can steel himself to put up with many other temperamental contradictions to be found in this capital of the Emilia. ”

“ If it is a dumb creature that has fallen stricken the grim coursers will sooner or later be assembled about it and alongside it, scrouging ever closer and closer to the dying thing, with awkward outthrustings of their naked necks and great dust-raising flaps of the huge, unkempt wings; lifting their feathered shanks high and stiffly like old crippled grave-diggers in overalls too tight—but silent and patient all, offering no attack until the last tremor runs through the stiffening carcass and the eyes glaze over. ”

“ The great American qualities, the American virtues, the American imagination, have thrown themselves almost wholly into business, the material development of the country. Americans are the first of modern peoples that have learned to respect the repeated failures of enterprising individuals with a genius for affairs, knowing that such failures often lead to greater heights of success. They have learned how to excuse enormous waste when it was made for the sake of economics lying in the distant future. ”

“ But Graham was past sanity. He only clutched with the more frenzy at the thing which seemed to keep him from the ravenous mouth of the snarling waters.
Wade, in a kind of composed despair, sent a look towards the beach. They were putting out a boat, a tiny sheel which frisked in the surf, and seemed motionless in the double action of the waves. Men laid hard at the oars. The little craft took the first big wave as a horse takes a hurdle. It dropped from the glassy height, and Wade saw it sink into a breach of the sea. ”

“ Such is the way of the buzzard—that shifting black question-mark which punctuates a Southern sky. In the woods a shoat or a sheep or a horse lies down to die. At once, coming seemingly out of nowhere, appears a black spot, up five hundred feet or a thousand in the air. ”

“ As she stood biting the baby, Reno understood why. His look devoured her.
Seeing him, her eyes only gave greeting, and, smiling, directed his to the group of animated children's overalls in a sand-pile in front of her. One particular occupant of one particular pair of overalls spied him. Lola flew. He held her off, brown, round, rosy. "Why, who is this? Whose little girl—or boy—are you?"
Her head dropped; she dropped from his hand like a nipped flower.
"Whose little girl are you?" coached a rich voice with an undercurrent of laughter. ”

“ In 1911 W. A. Wilde and Company, the Boston publishers, issued an exquisite edition of Evolution. Thus it will be seen that Smith and his masterpiece have received proper recognition from the publishers and the public; the judgment of posterity cannot be hurried; but that judgment can be anticipated, at least in part. That it will be favorable, characterizing Evolution as one of the cleverest, smartest things done by a nineteenth century American poet, the present writer does not for a moment doubt. ”

“ For many years the widows and the other women past their bloom, burned incense at the shrine of the mighty man who could wrap himself in his great-coat, dash through a field and over a fence, punching plants with his never-absent stick, and return to town with a poem pounding in his pulses, and another landscape in his brain. ”