Various

“ I have seen many a mouldering castle, but I remember no single mass of ruin more impressive than this towering square of Rochester.
It is not the absence of a close that damages Canterbury; the cathedral stands amid grass and trees, with a great garden sweep all round it, and is placed in such a way that, as you pass out from under the gate-house, you appreciate immediately its grand feature—its extraordinary and magnificent length. None of the English cathedrals seems more beautifully isolated, more shut up to itself. ”

“ When she ventured to look at him, he was asleep.
He lay in one of those troubled slumbers into which weakness and exhaustion will sometimes pass very suddenly; and in that slumber he had a dream which he never forgot. He thought he had risen from his grave with an awful sound in his ears, and knew he was wanted at the judgment-seat. But he did not want to go, therefore crept into the porch of the church and hoped to be forgotten. But suddenly an angel appeared with a flaming sword, and drove him out of the churchyard away to Scaurnose, where the Judge was sitting. ”

“ Every morning her good Louise took Léonie to the girls' school in the old stone mansion which had once been the home of Lamartine, and went every evening to conduct her home again. Of course, Léonie had her inseparable friend, as what school-girl has not, and few lovers are so devoted to each other as were Léonie Regnault and Hélène Duprès. They sat side by side every day in school, and out of school wrote each other long letters, of which they were generally themselves the bearers. Life seems so rich and inexhaustible when it is new—the merest nothing has its poem and history. ”

“ Hotel struck me as the best inn I had encountered in England. My principal errand at Dover was to look for Miss Betsey Trotwood's cottage, but I am sorry to say I failed to discover it. Was it not upon the downs, overlooking the town and the sea? I saw nothing on the downs but Dover Castle, which, in default of Miss Trotwood's stronghold, I zealously visited. It is an establishment of quite the same character, bristling with offensive and defensive machinery. More seriously speaking, it is a magnificent fortress—a bequest of the Middle Ages turned to excellent account by modern engineers. ”

“ Followed by Malcolm, she led the way over the Boar's Tail—nor would accept any help in climbing it—straight for the tunnel: Malcolm had never laid aside the key his father had given him to the private doors while he was yet a servant. They crossed by the embrasure of the brass swivel. That implement had now long been silent, but they had not gone many paces from the bottom of the dune when it went off with a roar. The shouts of the people drowned the startled cry with which Florimel turned to Malcolm, involuntarily mindful of old and for her better times. ”

“ We have thus rapidly seen what Paris does for her poor youth. The city has often been called the focus of light and the centre of intelligence. Without going quite so far as this, it must nevertheless be acknowledged that with her public schools, her splendid libraries, her museums, her natural history and art collections, and her very numerous and valuable institutions open free to all, Paris affords unusual facilities for boys, taken even from the lowest strata of society, to rise by dint of hard study, a firm will and exemplary conduct to the very highest positions. ”

“ I am tempted to believe in the nullity of every judgment, my own in particular—I who make it a business to judge others, and am so short-sighted.... The future will disclose what no one can foresee. There is no use in talking of ordinary wisdom and prudence: they have been utterly at fault. Guizot, the historian-philosopher, has turned out more stupid than a Polignac: Utopia and the poet's dream, on the contrary, have become facts and reality. I forgive Lamartine everything: he has been great during these days, and done honor to the poetic nature. ”

“ The rush of air, the daylight, the cheerful voice wakened the room as out of a vision of death. The men started to their feet; there was a tumult of voices and laughter; the materialized soul staggered back to reach the cabinet. The whole of the cheap trickery was bared: her hair was an ill-fitting wig, the chalk lay in patches on her face, the vapor of Hades was only salt burning in a dish: the boards removed from the window showed her snug hiding-place inside.
Dr. Dehr's fury made itself heard above the confusion: "You have brought Spiritualism into disrepute by your infernal imposture!" ”

“ The crowd was terribly compact and, beneath the Gothic arches, the odor was not that of incense. I slowly eliminated myself, with that very modified sense of disappointment that one feels in London at being crowded out of a place. This is a frequent disappointment, for you very soon find out that there are, selfishly speaking, too many people. Human life is cheap; your fellow-mortals are too plentiful. Whereever you go you make the observation. Go to the theatre, to a concert, to an exhibition, to a reception; you always find that, before you arrive, there are people enough on the field. ”

“ Place Alexander ille Magnus beside Malcolm's friend Epictetus, ille servorum servus—take his crutch from the slave and set the hero upon his Bucephalus, but set them alone and in a desert—which will prove the great man? which the unchangeable? The question being what the man himself shall or shall not be, shall or shall not feel, shall or shall not recognize as of himself and troubling the motions of his being, Alexander will prove a mere earth-bubble, Epictetus a cavern in which pulses the tide of the eternal and infinite Sea. ”

“ This rugged pile of Norman masonry will be left when a great many solid things have departed; it is a sort of satire on destruction or decay. Its walls are fantastically thick; their great time-bleached expanses and all their rounded roughnesses, their strange mixture of softness and grimness, have an indefinable fascination for the eye. English ruins always come out peculiarly when the day begins to fade. Weather-bleached, as I say they are, they turn even paler in the twilight and grow consciously solemn and spectral. ”

“ In an art-loving community like ours the career of a great artist is prouder than a queen's."
The color had faded from Léonie's face, but her father did not notice it.
"The empress condescended to speak to me about it to-day. Her Majesty has the welfare of the opera very much at heart, and, as she says, one is responsible for a talent like yours. It is the rarest of gifts. Why not consecrate it to the elevation of art and the delight of the world? A vocation for art is as sacred as one for religion, and it would be almost a crime in me to hold you back from so manifest a destiny as yours. ”

“ The proportion of flushed, empurpled, eruptive countenances is very striking; and the ugliness of the sight is not diminished by the fact that many of the faces thus disfigured were evidently once handsome. A very large allowance is to be made, too, for the people who bear the distinctive stamp of that physical and mental degradation which comes from the slums and purlieus of this dusky Babylon—the pallid, stunted, misbegotten and in every way miserable figures. These people swarm in every London crowd, and I know of none in any other place that suggest an equal degree of misery. ”

“ Out at once they all set along the shore to greet her arrival, each running regardless of the rest, so that from the Seaton to the middle of the Boar's Tail there was a long, straggling, broken string of hurrying fisher-folk, men and women, old and young, followed by all the current children, tapering to one or two toddlers, who felt themselves neglected and wept their way along. The piper, too asthmatic to run, but not too asthmatic to walk and play his bagpipes, delighting the heart of Malcolm, who could not mistake the style, believed he brought up the rear, but was mistaken ”

“ It is one thing for Saint Paul and another for Mr. Worldly Wiseman to put away childish things. The ways they do it, and the things they substitute, are both so different! And now first to me, whose weakness it is to love life more than manners, and men more than their portraits, the man begins to grow interesting. Picture the dawn of innocence on a dull, whisky-drinking, commonplace soul, stained by self-indulgence and distorted by injustice! ”

“ If any great unknown force of Nature has chosen him or his wife as tools, we should not despise the manifestation because the tools are very gross matter. They are the steel wire charged with the lightning, perhaps."
Dr. Dehr came forward and touched the motionless woman, shaking his head solemnly: "She is highly charged with electricity now, sir. The air is vital, as I might say, with spiritual presences. I have no doubt, gentlemen, before we part, that we shall see one of the most remarkable phenomena of the nineteenth century."
"How well she poses!" whispered Miss Fleming to the judge. ”

“ Can one ever be happy in suppressing a great talent? How it strives and agonizes for some manifestation of itself! and when it slowly dies, stifled in its living grave, must not one feel a bitter regret for having slain the nobler part of one's self?
But is it not heresy to doubt that a woman can sacrifice genius for love, and be content—yea, glad—with an infinite joy? ”

“ However, everything earthly has an end except a suit in chancery; and by nightfall (if there be any nightfall in this wonderful region, where it is lighter at midnight than in England at daybreak) we reach Viborg, a neat little town built along the edge of a narrow inlet, with the straight, wide, dusty streets which characterize every Russian town from Archangelsk to Sevastopol. Along the edge of the harbor runs a well laid-out promenade, a favorite resort after sunset, when the cool breeze from the gulf comes freshly in after the long, sultry hours of the afternoon. ”

“ There is not an accessory, not a touch of architectural fancy, not the narrowest concession to beauty. If I were a foreigner it would make me rabid; being an Anglo-Saxon I find in it what Thackeray found in Baker street—a delightful proof of English domestic virtue, of the sanctity of the British home. There are miles and miles of these edifying monuments, and it would seem that a city made up of them should have no claim to that larger effectiveness of which I just now spoke. ”

“ One man half leaned, half sat on the window-sill of Duncan's former abode, and round him were two or three more, and some women, talking about Scaurnose, and the factor, and what the lads there would do to-morrow; while the hush of the sea on the pebbles mingled with their talk like an unknown tongue of the Infinite—never articulating, only suggesting—uttering in song and not in speech—dealing not with thoughts, but with feelings and foretastes. ”

“ Certainly, if the English populace strike the observer by their good looks they must be very good-looking indeed. They are as ill-dressed as their betters are well-dressed, and their garments have that sooty-looking surface which has nothing in common with some forms of ragged picturesqueness. It is the hard prose of misery—an ugly and hopeless imitation of respectable attire. This is especially noticeable in the battered and bedraggled bonnets of the women, which look as if their husbands had stamped on them in hobnailed boots, as a hint of what is in store for their wearers. ”

“ In granite-paved Finland, as in limestone-paved Barbados, Nature has already laid down your road in a way that no human engineering can rival, and all you have to do is to smooth it to your own liking.
And now the great panorama of the far North—a noble change from the flat unending monotony of the Russian steppes—begins in all its splendor. At one moment we are buried in a dark depth of forest, shadowy and spectral as those which haunt us in the weird outlines of Retzsch ”

“ She was alone with her art. Her soul went forth into the song, and one listened in rapture, touched with pain that aught so sweet should be so evanescent. When the wonderful voice seemed to die like a vanishing soul there was silence for a moment—silence most eloquent of eulogies—and then came a burst of applause, the most enthusiastic that ever relieved a listener's heart or charmed a singer's ear.
The concert ended. Her father, proud and exultant, clasped her in his arms. Did he hear the whispers that Léonie's quick ear caught? "Colonel Regnault's daughter, the opera-singer's child. ”

“ They must be brought together, judge. You must do it. I have a word to say to Van Ness that will open his eyes to her merits. I will plant the seed, as I might say. It will grow fast enough."
The judge was silent as he helped Laidley, still talking eagerly, down the stairs and into his carriage. The whole fantastic scheme was, as he saw, the cowardly device of the dying man to appease his conscience. That this poor creature should have any power to influence Van Ness, the purest and strongest of men, was a mere bit of braggadocio, which surely did not deceive even Laidley himself. ”

“ Straightway it seemed as if the whole Seaton had come to share in it. Men and women were all out of doors; and, late as it was when the sun set, to judge by the number of bare legs and feet that trotted in and out with a little red flash, with a dull patter-pat on earthen floor and hard road, and a scratching and hustling among the pebbles, there could not have been one older than a baby in bed ”

“ In the solemn, subdued light of the northern evening we rattle in a crazy drosky over the uneven stones of the town into the vast desolate square in which stands the solitary hotel, a huge barrack-like building, up and down which we wander for some time, like the prince in the Sleeping Beauty's palace, without meeting any sign of life, till at length in a remote corner we come suddenly upon a chubby little waiter about the size of a well-grown baby, to whom we give our orders. ”

“ At Bacharach on the Rhine.
There grows the best of wine,
would or ought to be noticed for its wealth of old houses and its many architectural beauties, from the ruined (or rather unfinished) chapel of St. Werner, now a wine-press house, bowered in trees and surrounded by a later growth of crosses and tombstones, to the meanest little house crowding its neighbor that it may bathe its doorstep in the river—houses that when their owners built and patched them from generation to generation little dreamt that they would stand and draw the artist's eye when the castle was in ruins. ”

“ It is characteristic of the country that, barely out of sight of one of the principal ports of Finland, we are in the midst of a loneliness as utter as if it had never been broken by man. The only tokens of his presence are the narrow swathe of road running between the dim, unending files of the shadowy pine trees, and the tall wooden posts, striped black and white like a zebra, which mark the distance in versts from Viborg, the verst being two-thirds of a mile. ”

“ They were happy years for Léonie. Her young soul, full of the inspiration and power of genius, felt its wings growing. There is an atmosphere of art in Paris which is powerfully stimulating to any one of æsthetic tendencies; [Pg 65] and how exhilarating was this subtle atmosphere to Léonie! The Conservatoire, with its seventy professors and its thousand students, its competitions, concerts and public exercises, stimulated her zeal and inspired ever higher ideals that made close, hard study the play of her fresh and delighted faculties. Once a week her father took her to the opera. ”

“ Miss Horn had heard of their arrival, and was wandering about the house, unable even to sit down until she saw the marquis. To herself she always called him the marquis: to his face he was always Ma'colm. If he had not come she declared she could not have gone to bed; yet she received him with an edge to her welcome: he had to answer for his behavior. They sat down, and Duncan told a long sad story; which finished, with the toddy that had sustained him during the telling, the old man thought it better, for fear of annoying his Mistress Partan, to go home. ”