Theodore Winthrop

“ A romantic place.
And Stillfleet’s collection heightened the romantic effect. Stillfleet was a fellow of the practical and artistic natures well combined, with a bizarre slash, a bend dexter of oddity running through him. Fact, beauty, and fun were all represented in his museum.
He had, as he said, sampled all the ages. The ages when beings were brutes, and did nothing but feed and drink and fight and frisk and die, leaving no sign but an unwieldy skeleton, were represented in this Congress by a great thigh-bone, which a shambling mammoth had spent his days in exaggerating. ”

“ Is he a man whose art is a trade, who paints a picture as he would daub the side of a house? Or is he the true Artist, a refined and spiritualized being, Raphael in look, Fra Angelico in life, a man in force, but with the feminine insight, — one whose labor is love, one whose every work is a poem and a prayer? Which? Shall I knock and discover? An artist generally opens his doors hospitably to an amateur. ”

“ I dare say I shall lead a commonplace life enough here, — study, smoke, sleep, just as if the room were not thirty feet square, dimly lighted with mullioned windows, and hung with pictures grim with three centuries of silent monitorship. ”

“ The fossil stood to symbolize the first kick of animal life against chaos. From that beginning the series went on rapidly. The times when Art put its fancies into amorphous, into grotesque, into clumsy forms, had all contributed some typical object. ”

“ Two in the same Chrysalis, we cannot dodge each other without some trouble. If I am lonely by and by, and yearn for a friend, and he does not dance through my centre-piece, I will fire a pistol-ball through his floor. ”

“ A superstitious man might well be uneasy here. If I wanted to give a timid fellow the horrors, I would shut him up in this very room for a single night without light and without cigars. I don’t believe a guilty man could stand it at all. ”

“ I took the nearest staircase for the floor above, expecting to find there another corridor running the whole length of the building, as below. A locked door, however, at the left of the landing obstructed my passage towards Churm’s side of Chrysalis. At the right also was a door, cutting off that portion of the corridor. It stood ajar.
As I was turning to descend, and find my way by the other staircase to Churm’s lodgings, the question occurred to me, “Have I a neighbor overhead? Densdeth beside me, — who is above? ”