Robert Southey

“ Both place and monument had long been desecrated. As little religious feeling was excited by it as would have been by the altar to the Deæ Matres if it had stood there. And of the hundreds of travellers who daily pass it in, or outside of stage coaches, in their own carriages, on horseback, or on foot; and of the thousands who flock thither during the races; and of the inhabitants of Doncaster itself, not a single soul cares whether it be the original cross or not, nor where it was originally erected, nor when, nor wherefore, nor by whom! ”

“ Was it a great honour to Doncaster,—meaning by Doncaster, its Mayor, its Aldermen, its capital burgesses, and its whole people,—was it, I say, an honour, a great honour to it, and these, and each and all of these, that this altar should have been discovered? Did the corporation consider it to be so? Ought it to be so considered? Did they feel that pleasurable though feverish excitement at the discovery which is felt by the fortunate man at the moment when his deserts have obtained their honorable meed? ”

“ Our home,—our birth place,—our native land,—think for a while what the virtues are which arise out of the feelings connected with these words; and if thou hast any intellectual eyes thou wilt then perceive the connection between topography and patriotism.
Shew me a man who cares no more for one place than another, and I will shew you in that same person one who loves nothing but himself. Beware of those who are homeless by choice! You have no hold on a human being whose affections are without a tap-root. ”

“ Of all things in this our mortal pilgrimage one of the most joyful is the returning home after an absence which has been long enough to make the heart yearn with hope, and not sicken with it, and then to find when you arrive there that all is well. But the most purely painful of all painful things is to visit after a long long interval of time the place which was once our home;—the most purely painful, because it is unmixed with fear, anxiety, disappointment, or any other emotion but what belongs to the sense of time and change, then pressing upon us with its whole unalleviated weight. ”

“ The society then of Doncaster, in the middle of the last century, was like that of any other country town which was neither the seat of manufactures, nor of a Bishop's see; in either of which more information of a peculiar kind would have been found,—more active minds, or more cultivated ones. There was enough of those eccentricities for which the English above all other people are remarkable, those aberrations of intellect which just fail to constitute legal insanity, and which, according to their degree, excite amusement, or compassion. ”

“ He who said that he did not see why he should be expected to do any thing for Posterity, when Posterity had done nothing for him, might be deemed to have shown as much worthlessness as wit in this saying, if it were any thing more than the sportive sally of a light-hearted man. Yet one who “keeps his heart with all diligence,” knowing that “out of it are the issues of life,” will take heed never lightly to entertain a thought that seems to make light of a duty,—still less will he give it utterance. ”

“ I will not say the Lord helped Daniel Dove, because there would be an air of irreverence in the expression, the case being one in which he, or any one, might help himself. He knew enough of all the games which were then in vogue to have played at them, if he had so thought good; and he would have been as willing, sometimes, in certain moods of mind, to have taken his seat at a card-table, in houses where card-playing did not form part of the regular business of life, as to have listened to a tune on the old-fashioned spinnet, or the then new-fashioned harpsichord. ”

“ We cannot, dear Reader, tarry to visit the gardens in that same pleasant village from which the neighbouring cities are supplied with medicinal plants; where beds of ranunculuses afford, when in blossom, a spectacle which no exhibition of art could rival in splendour and in beauty; and from whence rose leaves are exported to Turkey, there to have their essential oil extracted for Mahometan luxury.
We must not go to see the sluices of the Rhine, which Daniel never saw, because in his time the Rhine had no outlet through these Downs. ”

“ Everydayman himself, and indeed of most persons: and were it otherwise, portrait-painting would be a worse profession than it is, though too many an unfortunate artist has reason bitterly to regret that he possessed the talents which tempted him to engage in it. There are few faces of which even a mediocre painter cannot produce what is called a staring likeness, and Sir Thomas Lawrence a handsome one; Sir Thomas is the painter who pleases every body! ”

“ REVENUE OF THE CORPORATION OF DONCASTER WELL APPLIED.
Play not for gain but sport: who plays for more
Than he can lose with pleasure, stakes his heart;
Perhaps his wife's too, and whom she hath bore. ”

“ I mean to say that the ideal face of any one to whom we are strongly and tenderly attached,—that face which is enshrined in our heart of hearts and which comes to us in dreams long after it has mouldered in the grave,—that face is not the exact mechanical countenance of the beloved person, not the countenance that we ever actually behold, but its abstract, its idealization, or rather its realization ”

“ Here I must relate a circumstance which occurred during the few hours of my last, and by me ever-to-be-remembered visit to Doncaster. As we were on the way from the Old Angel Inn to the Mansion House, adjoining which stood, or to speak more accurately had stood, the Kebla to which the steps of my pilgrimage were bent, we were attracted by a small but picturesque groupe in a shaving-shop, exhibited in strong relief by the light of a blazing fire, and of some glaring lamps. ”

“ And thus I might live in other years,—with those who are departed, in a world of my own, by force of recollection;—or by virtue of sure hope in that world which is theirs now, and to which I shall ere long be promoted.
For thy pleasure, Reader, and for thy improvement, I take upon myself the pains of thus materializing my spiritual stores. Alas! their earthly uses would perish with me unless they were thus embodied!
“The age of a cultivated mind,” says an eloquent and wise and thoughtful author, “is often more complacent, and even more luxurious, than the youth. ”

“ It is only in the company of the good that real enjoyment is to be found; any other society is hollow and heartless. You may be excited by the play of wit, by the collision of ambitious spirits, and by the brilliant exhibition of self-confident power; but the satisfaction ends with the scene. Far unlike this is the quiet confiding intercourse of sincere minds and friendly hearts, knowing and loving and esteeming each other; and such intercourse our philosopher enjoyed in Doncaster.
Edward Miller the Organist was a person very much after Daniel Dove's own heart. ”

“ Aye, Doctor! you meet in this world with false mirth as often as with false gravity; the grinning hypocrite is not a more uncommon character than the groaning one. As much light discourse comes from a heavy heart, as from a hollow one ”

“ Cotton Mather is such an author as Fuller would have been if the old English Worthy, instead of having been from a child trained up in the way he should go, had been calvinisticated till the milk of human kindness with which his heart was always ready to overflow had turned sour. ”

“ Chi sta più saggia, che un bebu d'armento?
CHIABRERA.
“What a kind of Being is circumstance!” says Horace Walpole in his atrocious tragedy of the Mysterious Mother.—A very odd kind of Being indeed. In the course of my reading I remember but three Beings equally remarkable,—as personified in prose and verse. Social-Tie was one; Catastrophe another; and Inoculation, heavenly Maid! the third.
But of all ideal Beings the most extraordinary is that which we call the Public. The Public and Transubstantiation I hold to be the two greatest mysteries in, or out of nature. ”

“ I should never have had heart purposely to visit it, for that would have been seeking sorrow; but to have made a circuit for the sake of avoiding the place would have been an act of weakness; and no man who has a proper degree of self-respect will do any thing of which he might justly feel ashamed. It was evening, and late in autumn when I entered Doncaster, and alighted at the Old Angel Inn. ”

“ And those that are proud of their beauty should consider that their own hue is as brittle as the glass wherein they see it; and that they carry on their shoulders nothing but a skull wrapt in skin which one day will be loathsome to be looked on. ”

“ We in some sort listen to such music as we do to the pleasing murmur of a neighbouring brook, the whisper of the passing breeze, or the distant warblings of the lark and nightingale; and if agreeable natural voices have the power of soothing the contemplative mind, without interrupting its contemplations, simple musical effusions must assuredly have that power in a superior degree. ”

“ Thinkest thou, reader, that they gave no proof of good sense in thus passing their lives? Look round the circle of thine acquaintance, and ask thyself how many of those whose time is at their own disposal, dispose of it more wisely,—that is to say more beneficially to others, or more satisfactorily to themselves? ”

“ To chuse upon such just motives as can leave no rational cause for after repentance requires riper judgement than ought to be expected at the age when the choice is to be made; it is best for us therefore at a time of life when though perhaps we might chuse well, it is impossible that we could chuse wisely, to acquiesce in the determination of others, who have knowledge and experience to direct them. Far happier are they who always know what they are to do, than they who have to determine what they will do. ”

“ Good patient reader, you may confide in me as in one who always knows his whereabout, and whom the Goddess Upibilia will keep in the right way.
In treating of that flourishing and every way fortunate town, I have not gone back to visionary times, like the author who wrote a description and drew a map of Anglesea, as it was before the flood. Nor have I touched upon the ages when hyenas prowled over what is now Doncaster race-ground, and great lizards, huge as crocodiles, but with long necks and short tails, took their pleasure in Potteric Carr. ”

“ Fear not, my patient reader, that I should lose myself and bewilder you, either in the Holy land, or Whichwood forest, or in the wide fields of the Poly-olbion, or in Potteric Carr, or in any part of the country about Doncaster, most fortunate of English towns for circumstances which I have already stated, and henceforth to be the most illustrious, as having been the place where my never-to-be-forgotten Philosopher and friend, passed the greater part of his innocent and useful and happy life. ”

“ Is it possible to conceive grosser improvidence in a nation, grosser folly, grosser ignorance of its duty and interest, or grosser neglect of both, than are manifested in the continuance and growth and increase of this enormous evil, when the means of checking it are so obvious, and that too by a process in which every step must produce direct and tangible good? ”

“ On the other hand wherever convents are among the institutions of the land, not to speak of those poor creatures who are thrust into them against their will, or with only a mockery of freedom in the choice,— it must often happen that persons enter them in some fit of disappointment, or resentment, or grief, and find themselves when the first bitterness of passion is past, imprisoned for life by their own rash but irremediable act and deed. ”

“ Dove of Doncaster, whose memory will be transmitted to posterity in these volumes, and he would have been much less worthy of being remembered. The course of such a life would have left him no leisure for himself; and metropolitan society in rubbing off the singularities of his character, would just in the same degree have taken from its strength.
It is a pretty general opinion that no society can be so bad as that of a small country town; and certain it is that such towns offer little or no choice. You must take what they have and make the best of it. ”

“ I smile to think how many of my readers when they are reading this chapter aloud in a domestic circle will bring up at the expression of running in love;—like a stage-coachman who driving at the smooth and steady pace of nine miles an hour on a macadamized road, comes upon some accidental obstruction only just in time to check the horses. ”

“ As for allowing the portrait to be exhibited, that is no more than an act of justice to the artist, who has no other means of making his abilities known so well, and of forwarding himself in his profession. If we look round the rooms at Somerset House, and observe how large a proportion of the portraits represent children, the old, and persons in middle life, we shall see that very few indeed are those which can have been painted, or exhibited for the gratification of personal vanity. ”

“ It is the reward of the due use of the endowments bestowed by nature: while they who in youth have made no provision for age, are left like an unsheltered tree, stripped of its leaves and its branches, shaking and withering before the cold blasts of winter. ”

“ Dogs who beyond all reasonable question have a sense of duty and fidelity and affection toward their human associates,—a sense altogether distinct from fear and selfishness,—who will rush upon any danger at their master's bidding, and die broken-hearted beside his body, or upon his grave,—dogs, I say, who have this capacity of virtue, have nevertheless been trained to act with robbers against the traveller, and to hunt down human beings and devour them. ”

“ And having her beauty thus impressed upon his imagination, any other appeared to him only as a foil to it, during that part of his life when he was so circumstanced that it would have been an act of imprudence for him to run in love. ”

“ Reader, if thou carest little or nothing for the Yorkshire river Don and for the town of Doncaster, and for the circumstances connected with it, I am sorry for thee. My venerable friend the Doctor was of a different disposition. He was one who loved, like Southey
———uncontrolled, as in a dream
To muse upon the course of human things;
Exploring sometimes the remotest springs,
Far as tradition lends one guiding gleam ”