Various

“ The gloaming of life sets a man straight not only with himself but with things, and gives him a truer knowledge than he ever had before. He stands full face to the west and looks into the light, which now he can bear, and which he no longer finds bewildering or blinding. That time of tumult and passion, of heat and strife, through which he has passed, how glad he is to leave it all behind him while waiting, watching for the quiet peace of the night through the tender softness of the gloaming! ”

“ The world lies hushed as a tired sleeper, and the moon and the stars come out as watchers—as signs too of other worlds and other lives. But the old man sitting pale and peaceful in the house-porch knows now what he no longer sees; for the gloaming of his life has passed into the deep stillness of something beyond, as the day has flowed into the night, and both lie in the hollow of God’s right hand. ”

“ To be sure the sweet Ave Maria of the evening is to the pious Catholic all that the twilight is to us; when the church bells ring out the hour for prayer, and the sign that the day’s work is done, and the hurrying crowd stands for a moment hushed, with uplifted hands and reverent faces raised to heaven, each man bareheaded as he says his prayer, calling on Madonna to help him and his. But in the fervid countries which lie in the sunshine from winter to autumn and from dawn to dark, there is no gloaming as we have it. ”

“ The sun goes down in a cloudless glory of burnished gold or blazing red, of sullen purple or of pearly opalescence; and then comes darkness swift and sudden as the overflowing of a tidal river; but of the soft gray luminous twilight—of that lingering after-glow of sky and air which we Northerners know and love—there is not a trace. Just as with the people themselves it is brilliant youth and glorious maturity, but for the most part an old age without dignity or charm. ”

“ Now in the gloaming the hope of that morrow has already lessened in anticipation the evil done by the clouds of to-day, and trust and hope come in the place of sorrow and despair. The worst has been—make room now for the better. No more false seeming and no more blinding by the deceived and flattered senses; no more mis-diversion of energy, and taking for pure and beautiful waters of life deadly morass and stagnant marsh. ”

“ The quiet spell of the gloaming, when the fairest visions are seen, the boldest wishes framed, the loftiest points reached—how useful it is if taken as the spring-board for the true leap—harmful enough if accepted as sufficient in itself; as if the hope, the wish, the incoherent intention were enough, and realisation always put off till the morrow, did not count. For there is ever the danger that day-dreaming should become a habit, and that a man should be contented with fashioning a thought in his brain without caring to embody it in deed. But there is always danger of misuse in all things ”

“ If crime has been committed, it is surely injurious to the public morals to write or publish anything calculated to elicit misplaced sympathy, and it is a poor trade to pander to morbid curiosity. If people fairly appreciated not only the wickedness and horror of crime, but its almost invariable meanness, pettiness, and misery, its feverish restlessness, its ever-haunting dread of detection—crime would be robbed of much of its semi-heroic character, and would cease to prove so attractive a bait to those who gloat over its every detail. ”

“ How near and yet how far off seem to him the unfulfilled hopes of the morning, the mistaken endeavour of the noon, the hard labour and fierce struggle of the day! If he had only known in time the things which were best for him, how differently he would have acted—and now: God’s will be done, and God pardon all his sins! He must take things as they stand, trusting in the unfailing mercy; for if repentance is good, regret is vain, and the gloaming is for peace, not strife. ”

“ At but too frequent intervals some villain is held up before the public, and becomes, so to speak, fashionable for the period over which his trial extends.
Every class of society provides its recruits now and again for the ranks of the infamous, and no matter to which stratum the criminal belongs, one newspaper or another is sure to be ready to report—with a minuteness which could not be more detailed if it were inspired by personal animosity—every stage and incident of his crime, and if procurable and sufficiently sensational, to supply an epitome of his antecedent career. ”

“ The history of crime or of a criminal career is invariably pitiable enough; but it is possible in some instances to invest it with a spurious interest, and even a sort of meretricious brilliance which is calculated to work an immense amount of harm among a certain class of people.
The principal object of a newspaper report nowadays would seem to be to present the public with an exciting and dramatic narrative, rather than a calm, unimpassioned statement of facts; to write, in short, rather for their amusement than information. ”

“ Or the girl—she who now sits with her big blue eyes fixed on her mother, shining with pitying tears for the sorrows of the divine Son of Man, for the trials of suffering saint and heroic martyr—when she is thrown into the great world of fashion and dissipation to become a ‘leader of society,’ surrounded by temptations of all kinds—she too will remember this hour, and all that she learned and felt at her mother’s side. ”

“ The mother’s influence never wholly dies; and never is that influence more powerfully exerted, its traces more deeply engraved than in the gloaming, when the sweet, sad Bible stories are told in a low and loving voice, till the whole heart is stirred, and the deepest recesses of spiritual consciousness are reached. ”

“ In the daytime, clouds obscured the sun, so that the impatient and sore-hearted said in his bitterness that the god had turned his face from the earth and from him, and that to-morrow’s glory would never rise. ”

“ It is the hour for all these grand dreams of ambition, all these fairy tales of hope; and if impossible at times to realise, yet they are good for the young mind to entertain; as it is good for the young athlete to try his strength against superior forces, and for the young bowman to aim higher than he can strike. ”

“ Mr Moss, his junior by some years, was better dressed, but his raven locks fell upon a shirt collar of dubious whiteness, and his dingy finger-nails were in unpleasant contrast with the splendour of the heavy rings he wore, and of the huge emerald in his satin necktie. The youngest of the three, Mr Isaacs, a hawk-eyed little man, bejewelled and florid of attire, was by far in dress and person the least unclean of the three. ”

“ Then passion was strong, and with passion, self-will, false aims, false beliefs—and disappointment as the shadow lying behind. If the power was there to create, to resist, to combat, to subdue, so also was the bitter smart and the cruel blow. ”

“ There were a good many customers in the outer office, a few of whom were quiet men of business, while the others, nearly half of whom were anxious-eyed ladies who had reached middle life, seemed flushed and ill at ease as they perused and reperused the written and printed memoranda with which they all seemed to be provided, and glanced impatiently at the ornamental clock on its gilded bracket. ”

“ In meadow and wood and garden the scents of flowers and sprouting leaves, of moss and ferns and bark and bud, are more fragrant now than in the freshness of even the early dawn—that childhood of the day! ”

“ To many thousands even in great centres of human life like London, Liverpool, Glasgow, or Edinburgh, the daily paper is almost the sole intellectual food sought for and within reach; and when we further consider the immense circulation of some of our newspapers, nearly approaching a quarter of a million a day, and when we think that each copy becomes the centre of an ever-increasing circle of information, we may reasonably assert that the penny paper, once held in contempt, is one of the most potent agents for good or evil which our generation possesses ”

“ If a strange fish was caught in the bay, a strange fossil found in a quarry, or a coin dug up in a field, it was always referred to Mr Grope; and there were only one or two people who ever presumed to smile at his conclusions. And now when Mr Grope dilated on the conspirator and the inscription in the newly-found cavern, addressing in his drawling tones the small audience in the drawing-room after dinner—for he had kept the sensation for the benefit of the ladies—no one arose to dispute his explanation. The conspirator’s mention of the month of roses was especially attractive and convincing. ”

“ She speaks to them of His purity, His love, His tenderness, and of the pattern left us in His life, by which we may all walk if we will. And to the end of their lives they remember those lessons of the quiet gloaming. One may go out into wild lands and live there with graceless men and Godless companions ”

“ The story of crime should legitimately produce in the public mind a sense of indignation against the criminal, of pity for the victim, of personal caution; the criminal should not be considered a sort of social scapegoat, and the indignation should not be Pharisaical, but should have its origin in an abhorrence of the crime rather than of the criminal. To the viciously inclined the story of detected crime should be a warning and a deterrent, both on the score of fear of detection as also upon higher moral considerations. ”

“ The remedy rests solely with the proprietors, on whom lies also the responsibility of purveying garbage to an unhappily large section of readers; but until public opinion forces upon them the fact that they are deliberately lowering themselves to the level of the vendors of ‘Penny Dreadful’ literature, sensational reporting of criminal trials is likely to flourish, inoculating the public mind with an unwholesome craving for details which should be banished from the pale of discussion among people with any pretensions to refinement, good taste, or common decency. ”

“ It was good amber-hued sherry, none of your modern abominations, but a real Spanish vintage, long mellowed in its dusty bin, that gurgled into the glasses under the careful handling of Mr Wilkins. The Hebrews sipped, appraised—where could be found judges so critical!—and drank.
‘I’m shorry for the poor young man,’ said Mr Braham, in a sort of outburst of sentiment, at mention of Captain Denzil’s name. ”

“ Or he is in the House arguing for humanity against statecraft, for justice against oppression, for truth against falsehood, and carrying the majority with him—making men’s hearts to burn within them by reason of his eloquence, his daring, and the intrinsic justice of his cause, for the first time indubitably proved by him. ”

“ They too come like the voices of Nature, telling softly secrets which the day cannot reveal. Everything is dreamy, indeterminate, and full of possibilities not yet realised. The moon is only a disc of unsubstantial vapour hanging softly in the sky, where the sunset tones still linger; the stars are faint uncertain points scarcely visible through the quivering chromatic haze; but gradually all this mystery will sharpen into the confessed beauty of the night, when the pale pure splendour of the{146} moon, the glorious brightness of the stars, will take the place of the gloaming. ”

“ Then the sunlight fell on the stagnant waters of the deadly swamp and turned them into lakes of purest gold, which a wise man would spend his time well to seek and his strength to possess. Now in the twilight the false shine has faded from the low-lying pools, and the dank and deadly mists creep up to mark both their place and quality. ”

“ Such as we find the world, however, we must put up with it, content, like them, to keep pegging away, and meeting the storms and buffetings of life with the same courageous spirit which enabled them to add their mite towards the honour, glory, and welfare of our common country. ”

“ Fashion and science ran into each other a good deal at Q——; and there were some needlessly pretty toilets among the party of friends whom Mr Grope conducted to visit the muddy recesses of his new cavern. There was also a geologist, but he rather despised the inscription as being too recent, and talked chiefly about eyeless fish. The young ladies, knowing little of either the Duke of Norfolk or the eyeless fish, explored the gloomy recesses, and filled them with the sounds of laughter and fun. ”

“ He brooded over it when he went to bed, and could not sleep because of it; but in the small-hours of the morning, that season of daring inspirations, it flashed across him that ‘Capt T..ck’ meant neither more nor less than ‘Caput Turci,’ a Turk’s head. ‘The man may have written k for i by inadvertence. But why should a Turk’s head be written about in the cave near Q——?’ It struck Mr Grope that the battle of Lepanto had been fought in 1571, and that the conspirator might be alluding to an invasion of England which was to take place, when the Turk’s head should be figuratively cut off. ”

“ They have receded, let me see, two and seven-eighths since this morning,’ returned the broker, pointing to the official bulletin in its frame on the wall beside him. ‘Probably they are falling as we speak, for the Bourses of Paris, Amsterdam, and Vienna opened heavily.’
‘Well, you are a Job’s comforter, Bales,’ said the lawyer, wiping his heated brow. ‘Will this sort of thing go on, hey? Shall I sell, or stick to my colours like a Briton? Can’t you give a fellow your advice?’
‘I never advise,’ answered Mr Bales, with his cold smile. ‘Life would be a burden to me if I did. ”

“ In very truth, although there was a messenger, fleet of foot and cunning in threading his way through the labyrinthine intricacies of the City, always perched on a leather-covered stool in the antechamber, to supplement the services of the office lad, Mr Wilkins had no clerk. ”