R. V. Risley

“ Memory is fickle, and a man must woo constantly or she becomes indifferent. Hate may drowse into sleep. Memory as often implies struggle as calm and sadness is her companion. But great hate is quiescent and can smile in its sure fidelity.
All large thoughts lift us on invisible wings broadening our horizon, yet make us sadder as seeing further; the gods must be very sad from so far on high. A man of little thoughts can understand grief, but never sadness or sorrow. Thus great hate brings a man's position in self-command, and gives him sight in the distance. ”

“ Now, our hurried days seldom admit of the building of a great fortress-book—our strong books are only outworks around literature. We are tired with eccentricity, the cheapest apology for originality. We are ashamed of the nakedness of sincerity and deal in transient things—from the shades no wail immortal of sad Orpheus ascends from his interminable search.
You, my friend, see books from the standpoint of men, knowing men too well. Sorrow sees deep and is kind, and you know men yet you care for them. ”

“ Each of us walks with a companion called delusion towards whom we some day turn, and when we look into his face we see that we have been walking with a voice, an air, a mere reflection of ourselves, that only our love has warmed into the semblance of life. We are come from the country of youth where life cried with a sound as of triumph in the morning; now the valleys of evening hold us; our energy glows dully in the ashes of fatigue ”

“ We have not such loves. Some men are blessed with never finding out that ideals live only in the ideal. The little door of Heaven does not turn on its hinges of light to our knocking, and only a ray of the luminous beyond steals out to us under its threshold.
A few men whose minds are dark with sorrows and whose laughters are all asleep have spoken in huge, soft organ tones, and made the world colder in the shadow of their everlasting pain as when a great berg passes by on the ocean in the dark. ”

“ But I think that beside the great ones there walk silently men as great, men who do not care so much for expression and whose souls sing to themselves alone.
Silence is master of spirits, but we must speak to him in a tongue of great emotions that we are not often cursed with the memory of. For silence to let loose his legions of thoughts upon us, we must be in the extreme to receive them, else they become silence again. So we rush to sound, and as noise is the standard of our importance, so music is that of our beauty. ”

“ All great speech has broken silence, the noises scare it, and it remains underground; only it comes forth in the stillnesss of the night like the elves and flies at the trivial tread of the light. In such silence hate lives and draws its everlasting, imperceptible breaths.
Great places or great deeds can lift little men to their level, but hate is not violent and requires great men. ”

“ Ideals are cruel in that they change, and the reason we pity them is because they cannot help being cruel to us. So, we constantly remove further along the paths of wonder, leaving the old places and levels empty. But time to you does not seem to progress, because you yourself do not change, and the moods of the years do not entice you.
You have seen how in these days men search for laughter, the slighted jester-angel too wayward for long attendance. Sick of the ache for truth, we turn to amusement to soothe the eternal disappointment. ”

“ But when we hear youth calling, and, turning our heads, find that we are old, we take a landscape view of life, and we realise that our light has been the light of dreams, and with the puny lantern of our wisdom we have been groping in an unknown country and have not seen the sun.
Life tyrannises over us; ambition leads us on for ever after the illusive music of success played by the eternal invisible minstrels. We burden our gods with useless prayers, and God is cruel when only His silence answers ”

“ Some souls move through the world to soft sounds, but some, more wildly strong, sweep through the years with uproar and endeavour. But the tune of your life has been silence, which is the divinest harmony when understood in love. ”

“ And there is a love in hate and a contentment; a love of itself and a contentment in its own existence. In the years it becomes a dear possession to a man as progressing with him, and its fidelity makes it firm-placed, and cared for as something to be trusted.
Nothing can so lift a thoughtful man in his own eyes as the realisation that something in his nature is faithful to him. For fidelity is the most nobly human of all qualities and a man faithful to himself the strongest of men.
So great hate becomes dear in the changes as something remaining beyond all things. ”

“ And old Hope has blind beautiful eyes and smiles, and Sorrow's eyes are deep with sight, and she is always young.
Are you so spiritual that you feel the pain of the world's look? Does it see more than the reflection of itself? The world is a great dreamer though it credits only its exceptions with its dreams. ”

“ Old successes come to be standards against our failures, old energies against our new fatigues; old happy moods become slight-pained regrets, and age laughs sadly at unwise, dear youth. Men swerved in the all-desire to forget, embrace oblivion, and they are wise. Forgetfulness is a blessing, like the blessing of whole-hearted, unweary laughter to a world-tired man. ”

“ Race, which is below nations, rests unseen for the reason of the silence, yet when, in its time, this deeper vitality that evolves nations, speaks, methods of rule are powerless, and governors seem insignificant.
When that great captive animal we call a people roars its fatigue the voices of the trainers are lost; when race grows feeble and old, the noise of government sinks into complaining. ”

“ A nature that realises sadness is never expressive, and its depths exist in silence and hide away from men. So, your life has been on the defensive, and in your isolation you have been mournfully unprotected against dreams. Your instinct of knowledge allowed you illusive consolations, and loneliness, the loneliness that dwells upon the altitudes, the loneliness of a wise mind, interpreted mankind to you. ”

“ Surely our minds have many strings, and the harmony becomes a monotony by the twanging of any one of them. Surely it is the philosophy of the utter philosopher to spoil no harmony, though the vanity we call truth make a truthful discord. For when vanity has laid her painted hand upon our eyes we prate of truths we never saw before. ”

“ Surely history, who was born old, is very tired, tired with the fatigue of the ages and their unoriginality, tired and sick, and sorrowful with knowledge of men. She has been so long ring master in the circus of the generations, watching their ceaseless round to the cracked old music of the years, God must seem very cruel to her. ”

“ But you have found laughter ready to your call, for your mind has remained sensitive in solitude.
You have seen how a spirit of discontent drives us, and how weary we are, and you have seen our sorrow in the age's dissolution, that man can not reverse time s glass when the sands run out. But you have not found music enough in the world's applause to care to listen for it, and you are so sad that you have become friendly with fatigue. ”

“ Yet surely it is more easy to feel friendly towards nations, for History is a cold-voiced minstrel, and her nonsense seems unhuman, and her griefs and laughter come from very far away.
People are like the weather. Some discourage us into departure for sunnier climates by their overcoat faces, some soothe us into resistance by their long-drawn content, till our levelled senses ache for a discord, but these are sordid, stupid men the temples in whose minds were built with closed doors; and the stupid man is his own contentment, as a great man is his own destiny. ”

“ We feel it possible to be our best, but the harmony of our souls is broken by the discords of life, which demand loudly, and give no care to the hesitating depths of thought that stand always upon the threshold. ”

“ A great man always has great egotisms. But modernity has given man a new sorrow, fatigue of man. We wonder which outbalances this weariness, and ingratitude, and sickness, and loss of companions, or laughing, the dear vanity of loving, careless thoughts, and the boisterous wills of the animal. Sometimes we have been hurried through these fancies when old moods hurt us, or when illness gave us tired knowledge of the persistent angles of a room. Time is tired of us, and we are tired of time. ”

“ Men leave us, and moods depart, and perhaps hurt memory at re-meeting; but books have no unkindness, and it is we who change. Friends force on us their content, or exhibit their woes as sign-boards to say our laughter trespasses on life. But books gravely await our coming and are our hospitable hosts entertaining the moods of us, their guests. ”

“ Perhaps we are all the trumpets of the Deity, but we cannot speak what the invisible lips have breathed into our being. Possibly we are all beautiful each with a self beauty of our own, only circumstance spoils us. ”

“ We are founded on dreams and greatly planned, but we are smaller-minded architects than nature, and have built every-day dwellings on the foundations of palaces.
The grassless path of generations still is resonant with the echo of ringing feet, now resting—the feet of the men whose minds struck a sharp note through the monotony of the years. ”

“ We know only the midway of things and the beginnings and endings are in the dark; for man's knowledge is a lantern that he himself carries and the light falls round him. All this the world knows is true. ”

“ But, my friend, thoughts, too sad thoughts, have dulled the world to the shade of ashes and disappointment, and we are become old too young. There are autumn leaves in the bowls of our spirits, withered flame of bright colour. ”

“ Among men of keen senses the gate of the emotions most easily hinged is the gate of harmonious sound. Their souls are like guitar-boards—responsive innately to the running of the notes overhead. But in some men Nature s dulling thumb rests upon the high strings of their souls, her slow fingers touching only the bass chords of their heavy reason, drawing flat notes and level. ”

“ There are so few strong men. The strong man, self-willed and of no reverence, uses himself as a sledge, of which his will is handle, and bangs out the glowing shapes of his mind on the anvil of the world ”

“ To such minds the stones that bore the tops of history's heels are not mere paving-stones, and in all places where men have thought great thoughts invisible cathedrals erect themselves where understanding worships.
Books pursue us through the long avenues of days that are not our own. ”

“ Great hate and great love are pair, but love is the feminine and the most beautiful and is unhuman; while great hate is a man and its strength is earth-strength, not like the woman's.
Hate also is unthoughtful, being thought, for the action or thinking implies levels, but hate rests quiet, and is almost forgotten. ”

“ They call to us in appeal, their questioning livens the dark not only the voices of the shapes that we have passed within the staunch reality of the day, but the voices of the shapes that outnumber these, the shapes of loneliness and disillusion, and the wordless voices of those two are terrible. ”

“ Envy is the slim rapier, and the more we handle it the lighter it feels to our grasp. It is a delicate weapon and prolific of imagination. Yet, once dropped, the cunning feel of the blade leaves us, and its fickle laugh looks whimsical, not formidable, along the ground. ”

“ We have lived too much with books, and books eat out a man's youth; a spell of other days and other lives winds him in the melodious woof of dreams, and modern thoughts drown and die away in the unnoticed sound of modern years. ”

“ And large thoughts remove a man so far out of the trivial, walling him apart from other men. And thus great hate gives a man distinction, as being individual, and not only relative as most of us are.
Great loves do not see oblivion, trusting through it, but great hate, not of God, but of the nature below our feet, has neither care nor trust, its existence being sufficient for its satisfying. ”

“ Exasperation is physical, the itch inside the thumb, the transient wish for suffering. Like a dog growling, or the Arab stabbing up between the bloody hoofs, we turn the gaze back to savagery, and with a shrug cast off the painted blanket of our civilisation. ”

“ Death is always a tragedy because of its possibilities perhaps it is change, perhaps oblivion, and the former is the more tragical, for when things change away and confute memory by dissemblance it is more pitiful than when they fall, becoming memories. ”

“ But you, my friend, are cursed with too clear sight in men— the cold sight, not like the tinged vision of the enthusiast. You have not the blessing of credulity, that soothing hand that strokes keen thought to slumber. ”

“ Anger is sudden, or, like the storm long gathering, breaks in thunder and crooked lightning, that runs jagged over the face of the tumult, while our disturbed senses hurry across the lighter skies of our natures like clouds. ”