Various

“ The populace is always thus—the giddiest-pated fool that ever screamed, as loud and as ignorant as a parrot, as changeful as the wind in March, as base as the cuckoo. The same people threw stones at me when they brought me to this prison—the same people that feasted and applauded me then, that first day of my return to Orte. To-day, indeed, some women weep, and the little child brings me half a pomegranate. That is more remembrance than some fallen idols get, for the populace is cruel: it is a beast that fawns and slavers, then tears. ”

“ A mile away, between me and the stars, was the grand black pile of Sant' Aloïsa.
Christ! it was strange! I had led a rough life, I had been no saint. I had always been ready for jest or dance or intrigue with a pretty woman, and sometimes women far above me had cast their eyes down on the arena, as in Spain ladies do in the bull-ring to pick a lover out thence for his strength; but I had never cared. I had loved, laughed and wandered away with the stroller's happy liberty, but I had never cared. ”

“ Most of the actions and events of our lives are chameleon-hued: their colors vary according to the light by which we view them. Thus Eve, who the night before had seen nothing but happiness in the final arrangement between Adam and herself, awoke on the following morning with a feeling of dissatisfaction and a desire to be critical as to the rosy hues which seemed then to color the advent of their love.
The spring of tenderness which had burst forth within her at sight of Adam's humility and subsequent despair had taken Eve by surprise. ”

“ At Orte my mother and grandmother dwelt together in one room that looked over the river—a large vaulted chamber with grated casements, with thick stone walls—a chamber in what had once been a palace. My mother was then still very young and beautiful—of a pale, serious beauty, full of sadness. She smiled on me sometimes, but never once did I hear her laugh. She had never laughed since that awful day when, in the full sunlight, in the midst of the people, in the sight of the sea, in Genoa, a man had dropped from air to earth like an eagle fallen stone dead from the skies, struck by lightning. ”

“ Is the individual not to be considered, but only the good of the mass? Can there be justice and righteousness in a plan that requires the lifelong martyrdom of a few? Have not these few as much right to a full and free development, to liberty to work out their own ambitions, as have any of the multitude who reap the benefit of their sacrifices? But peace: this little existence is not all there is of life, and in the sphere of wider opportunities and higher activity that awaits us there will be room for these thwarted, stunted lives to grow and flourish and bloom in immortal beauty. ”

“ Nearly every day, and often many times a day, farm-wagons drawn by two horses pass along the highway in front of my window. The wagon-bed is filled with sacks of wheat or piled high with yellow corn, and on the high spring-seat in front sits the farmer driving, and by him his wife, her head invariably wrapped in a white woollen nubia or a little shawl, worn as a protection against the catarrh-producing prairie winds. Cuddled in the hay at their feet, but keeping a bright lookout with round eager eyes, are two or three stout, rosy children, and often there is a baby in the mother's arms. ”

“ As we turned to the left and crossed the wildly-rolling hills, and forded Clarke's Fork to camp by Dead Indian Creek, the novelty and splendor of this almost unequalled view grew and grew. As I close my eyes it comes before me as at the call of an enchanter. From the main valley the outlook is down five grass-clad valleys dotted with trees and here and there flashing with the bright reflection from some hurrying stream. The mountains between rise from two to ten thousand feet, and are singular for the contrasts they present. ”

“ I am big and strong as the oxen are, but they work, and I have never worked. I have shown myself, and the people have thrown me money—a silly life, good to no man or beast. Oh yes, that I know full well now; and I have killed Phœbus because you looked at me; and my mother, who has loved me all her life, is old before her time through my fault. I am a graceless fool, a mountebank. When I put off my spangles and stand thus, you see the rude peasant that I am. And yet in all the great, wide, crowded world I know there does not live another who could love you as I love—seeing you twice. ”

“ And so have the Leatherstonepaughs sometimes wondered if, after all, to come to Rome is not more of a loss than a gain in the dimming of one of their fairest ideals. For is there another city in the world where certain of the vulgar verities of life press themselves more prominently into view than in the Eternal City? Can one anywhere have a more forcible conviction that greasy cookery is bile-provoking, and that it is because the sylvan bovine ruminates so long upon the melancholy Campagna that one's dinners become such a heavy and sorrowful matter in Rome? ”

“ Across from the chalets rises the grat or ridge where we have to seek our edelweiss. As we mount higher the gray masses of the Spielgarten seem very near: a fresh vivifying wind, the breath of the Alps, makes one forget how warm it was toiling up the gorge. The clouds are drawing around in white veils and sweeping down into the valley, quite concealing our destination at times, hiding even the members of the party from each other if they separate themselves a little. ”

“ From the bewildering desolateness of these savage peaks the eye wanders to the foot-hills, tree-clad with millions of pines, and lower yet to the wide valley of the West Branch of Clarke's Fork of the Yellowstone, through which a great stream rushes; and then, beyond the river, park over park with gracious boundaries of fir and pine, and over all black peak and snow-clad dome and slope, nameless, untrodden, an infinite army of hills beyond hills. The startling combination of black volcanic peaks with gray and tinted limestone still makes every mile of the way strange and grand. ”

“ She was beautiful of face, as I say, like one of the Madonnas of our old painters: she was industrious, and all her little world knew very well that she would one day inherit the strip of field and the red cow that my grandmother owned outside the gates of Orte. All these pretty suitors of course made a great fuss with me, caressed me often, and brought me tomatoes, green figs, crickets in wire cages, fried fish and playthings. But my mother looked at none of them. When a woman's eyes are always looking downward on a grave, how should their tear-laden lids be lifted to see a fresh lover? ”

“ And the air of offended dignity with which she gave this argument forced Adam to exclaim, "Oh, Eve, forgive me if I have spoken hastily: it is only because I think so much more of you—place you so much higher than any other girl I ever saw—that makes me expect so much more of you. Of course," he continued, finding she remained silent, "you had every right to allow your friend to go with you, and it was only natural he should wish to do so; only when I'm so torn by love as I am I feel jealous of every eye that's turned upon you: each look you give another seems something robbed from me." ”

“ Besides the small wild flowers there are many shrubs and trees that bloom in spring. The haw tree and wild plum put forth masses of small creamy-white flowers, the redbud tree blooms along the water-courses, the dogwood in the woods and the wild crab-apple upon the open hillside. The crab trees often form dense thickets an acre or two in extent, and when all their branches are thickly set with coral buds or deep-pink blossoms they form a picture upon which the eye delights to rest. Spring redeems even the flat prairie from the blank monotony which wearies the eye in winter. ”

“ All I saw that day, as I tramped around it wet and cold, was the gloomy evil shadow of the great place that had once been a fortress, the barred and shattered windows, the iron-studded doors, the grass-grown bastions. She had made me kill Phœbus, and yet I only lived to see her face again.
Sometimes I think love is the darkest mystery of life: mere desire will not explain it, nor will the passions or the affections. You pass years amidst crowds and know naught of it: then all at once you meet a stranger's eyes, and never again are you free. ”

“ What wonder, then, if their eyes have a weary, questioning look, as if they were always searching the flat prairie-horizon for some promise or hope of better days, something fresh and stimulating to vary the dull monotony of toil?
"There's a better time coming," the farmer says. "When we get the farm paid for we will build a new house and send the children to town to school;" and so the slow years go by. If every new country is not actually fertilized with the heart's blood of women, the settling and development of it none the less require the sacrifice of their lives. ”

“ Here and there, at wide intervals, a few farm-houses can be seen, sheltered on the north and west by a thickly-set row of cottonwood or Lombardy poplar trees, which serve in a great measure to break the sweep of the pitiless Iowa winds. Most of the houses are large and comfortable, and are surrounded by barns, haystacks and young orchards, denoting a long residence and prosperity; but two or three, far off on the horizon, are small wooden structures, set on the bare prairie, without a tree or outbuilding near them, and looking bleak and lonely. ”

“ At our feet the mountain fell away abruptly, pine-clad, and at its base the broad plain of the East Branch of the Yellowstone wandered through a vast valley, beyond which, in a huge semicircle, rose a thousand nameless mountains, summit over summit, snow-flecked or snow-clad, in boundless fields—a grim, lonely, desolate horror of rugged, barren [Pg 33] peaks, of dark gray for the most part, cleft by deep shadows, and right in face of us one superb slab of very pale gray buttressed limestone, perhaps a good thousand feet high. ”

“ Taddeo is rich: he has gold in the ground, in the trees, in the rafters and the stones of the house; he has gold in Roman banks; he has gold in foreign scrip, and in ships, and in jewels, and in leases: he is rich. And he lives like a gray spider in the cellar-corner. He shuts me up here. We eat black bread, we see no living soul: once in the year or so I go to Orte or to Penna. ”

“ Self-renunciation and absolute devotion and self-sacrifice are natural to women of a certain quality of intellect and heart, and possess the most powerful charm to their imagination, provided they can have a dash of romance or a kindling of sentiment. Hence this form of martyrdom offers the female sex the pose in which it has sat for its portrait all the centuries since civilization began, and the picture stands out impressively against a background we all can recognize. As a school for heroism nothing can equal marriage with a spoiled child. ”

“ But improvement of the civil service, important as it is in itself, is an insignificant object of aspiration compared with the general purification of political life, the elevation of the public sentiment, the creation of a school of statesmanship in that arena which is now only a mart for hucksters, bargaining and wrangling, drowning all discussions and impeding all transactions of a legitimate nature. The class who fill that arena and block every avenue to it cannot be dispossessed so long as the system which furnishes the capital and material for their traffic remains unchanged. ”

“ The highway which runs a bowshot from my bower-eaves is a much-travelled road, leading from the farms of a prairie country into a prairie town. It is a stripe of black earth fifteen or twenty feet wide, the natural color of the soil, ungraded, ungravelled, and just now half a foot deep in mud from the melting February snows. Looking in the direction from which it comes, a mile or two of rolling prairie-land is visible, divided into farms of one hundred, one hundred and forty or one hundred and sixty acres. ”

“ The Tiber rolls close by, yellow and muddy with the black buffaloes descending to its brink to drink, and the snakes and the toads in its brakes counting by millions—sad, always sad, whether swollen by flood in autumn and vomiting torrents of mud, or whether with naked sands and barren bed in summer, with the fever-vapors rising from its shallow shoals. The villa is dull and mournful like the river—built of stone, fortified in bygone centuries, without color, without light, without garden or greenery, all its casements closed like the eyelids of a living man that is blind. ”

“ Submitting with patience to a destiny that is unavoidable, let your tenderness for me soon cease to agitate that lovely bosom: banish it to the house of darkness and dust, with the object that can no longer be benefited by it, and transfer your affections to some worthy person who shall supply my place in the relation I have borne to you. It is for the living, not the dead, to be rendered happy by the sweetness of your temper, the purity of your heart, your exalted sentiments, your cultivated spirit, your undivided love. ”

“ She is unreasonable, and he loves her unreason—it bewitches him: she is obstinate, and he loves to feel the strength of her tiny will, as if it were the manifestation of some phenomenal force in her nature. Her scorn for common things, her fastidiousness, her indifference to the little obligations which compel less dainty and spirited creatures,—all act as chains and rivet his attachment to her. ”

“ I cannot tell how the long hot days went on: they were days of drought to the land, but they were days of paradise to me. The fever-mists were heavy and the peasants sickened. Tiber was low, and had fetid odors as its yellow shallows dried up in the sun, clouds of gnats hovered over the Lagherello and its beds of rushes, and the sullen wind blew always from the south-east, bringing the desert sand with it. ”

“ But after many weeks, after the sights have been "done," the mouldy and mossy nooks of the old city explored, and the marvellous picturesqueness that hides in strange places revealed—after one has a speaking acquaintance with all the broken bits of old statues that gather moth and rust where the tourist cometh not and the guidebook is not known, and has followed the tiniest thread of legend or tradition into all manner of mysterious regions,—then the sentimentalist begins to love Rome again—Rome as it is, not Rome as it seemed through the glamours of individual imagination. ”

“ The spoiled child blossoms into perfection as a young lady. That is her destiny, and to the proper fulfilment of it her family and friends stand ready to devote themselves. It may be they are a trifle weary of her incalculable temper, that her fascinations have palled a little upon them, and that her mysterious inability to put up with the lot of every-day mortals and bear disagreeables contentedly has worn out their patience. They want her to marry, and, without wasting any empty wishing upon a result so certain to come, she wants to marry herself. ”

“ Surely there isn't any need to take such idle talk as serious matter. If you and me hadn't seen some good in one another we shouldn't have taken each other, I suppose; and, thank the Lord, we haven't to please anybody but our two selves."
"Wa-al, 'tis to be hoped you'll find that task aisier than it looks," retorted Uncle Zebedee with a touch of sarcasm; while Jerrem, after watching Adam go out, endeavored to throw a tone of regret into the flattering nothings he now whispered by way of congratulation, but Eve turned impatiently away from him. ”

“ Except in the north-east, where the land is rolling and densely wooded, the horizon-line is flat and on a level with our feet. The sun rises from the prairie as he rises from the ocean, and his going down is the same: no far-off line of snowy mountains, no range of green hills nor forest-crest, intercepts his earliest and his latest rays. Over this wide stretch of level land the wind sweeps with unobstructed violence, and more than once in the memory of settlers it has increased to a destructive tornado, carrying buildings, wagons, cattle and human beings like chaff before it. ”

“ I thought it the most savage mountain-scenery I had ever beheld, while the almost feminine and tender beauty of the parks which dotted these wild hills was something to bear in remembrance.
But the escort was moving, the mules crowding on behind our halted column; so presently we were slipping, sliding, floundering down the hillside, now on steep slopes, which made one a bit nervous to ride along; now waiting for the axemen to clear away the tangle of trees crushed to earth by the burden of some year of excessive snow; now on the horses, now off, through marsh and thicket. ”

“ There was no house in which to lay their heads, no sawmill where lumber could be obtained, no tree to shelter them, unless they had the good fortune to locate near a stream—nothing but a smooth, level expanse of prairie-sod, bright green and gay with the flowers of early summer or faded and parched with the droughts of autumn. Sometimes they camped in the open air until lumber could be brought from a distance and a rude shanty erected, but often they built a turf house, in which they passed their first winter. ”