William Conant Church

“ When at a later period than most girls, owing to domestic circumstances which it is needless to unfold, she made her entrance into society and learned what it was to be in the world and of the world, to talk and listen, to please and be pleased, to be admired, flattered and interested, her admirable faculties and beautiful intellect, ripened in studious solitude, burst into luxuriant bloom and bore the fairest fruit. Miss Congreve was accordingly a person for whom a man of taste and of feeling could not help entertaining a serious regard. Philip Osborne was emphatically such a man ”

“ The park at Hatfield is worthy of the house; one cannot say more for it. It is of the highest antiquity, and seems like a remnant of early English forest. Its gnarled and twisted oaks are disposed in avenues in which you would stroll up and down indefinitely if it were not that you constantly incline to wander away and fling yourself at the foot of one of the innumerable detached trees, as mighty of girth and as fantastic of limb, which are scattered at hazard over the sides of the grassy undulations. ”

“ You evidently care nothing for the poor girl. You have got over your love rather too well. You loved her, she was indifferent to you, and now you take your revenge." Distracted with grief, Lennox was taking refuge in irrational anger. Baxter was puzzled. "You'll admit," said he, with a smile, "that it's a very handsome revenge." And all his professional self-esteem rose to his assistance. "I've painted for Miss Everett the best portrait that has yet been painted in America. She herself is quite satisfied."
"Ah!" said Lennox, with magnificent dissimulation; "Marian is generous." ”

“ On a large canvas a white draped figure, with its back to the spectator, and with a sinister sweep of garment and gesture, prepares to pass across a threshold where, beside a rosebush that has shed its flowers, a boy figure of love staggers forth, and, with head and body reverted in entreaty tries in vain to bar its entrance. The picture has a certain graceful impressiveness, and the painter has rendered with peculiar success the air of majestic fatality in the pale image which shows no features. ”

“ Judged by the testimony of the wooden-shirted fraternity, the English are both the most musical and the most pictorial of races. There are half a dozen concerts every day; there is a special "exhibition" in every print shop. Every song, every singer, every picture, is the subject of a special placard, and you thus walk about in a wilderness of æsthetic mementoes. If you are a perfect stranger, you will at first be led to suppose that you are in a city whose native inspiration is a kind of résumé of the arts of modern Germany, mediæval Florence, and ancient Athens. ”

“ That a woman should deal in so free-handed a fashion with a female parent, upon whom nature and time have enabled her to look down from an eminence, seems at first a considerable anomaly; and the woman who does it must to no slight extent have shaken herself free from the bonds of custom. I do not mean that George Sand talks scandal and tittle-tattle about her mother; but Mme. Dupin having been a light woman and an essentially irregular character, her daughter holds her up in the sunshine of her own luminous contemplation with all her imperfections on her head. ”

“ Why should an honest young couple have such strange things said of them? Why should they be called upon to read such an illegible riddle? Emma repented bitterly of having told her secret. And yet, too, she rejoiced; for it was a dreadful thought that David, unprompted to reveal his own adventure should have kept such a dreadful occurrence locked up in his breast, shedding, Heaven knows what baleful influence, on her life and fortunes. Now she could live it down; she could combat it, laugh at it. And David, too, could do as much for the mysterious prognostic of his own extinction. ”

“ They were, indeed very proper swains for the young ladies at their sides, but Henrietta Congreve was not one of these. She was not a mere twaddling ball-room flirt. There was in her coquetry something serious and exalted. It was an intellectual joy. She drained honest men's hearts to the last drop, and bloomed white upon the monstrous diet. As Philip glanced around the circle, his eye fell upon a young girl who seemed for a moment to have forgotten her neighbors, her sandwiches and her champagne, and was very innocently contemplating his own person. ”

“ Burne Jones's contributions to the Grosvenor is a very charming picture entitled "Venus's Mirror," in which a dozen young girls, in an early Italian landscape, are bending over a lucid pool, set in a flowery lawn, to see what I supposed to be the miraculously embellished image of their faces. Into some such mirror as this the painters and poets of Mr. Burne Jones's turn of mind seem to me to be looking; they are crowding round a crystal pool with a flowery margin in a literary landscape, quite like the angular nymphs of the picture I speak of. ”

“ The baby softly opened her eyes, and, vaguely conscious of her father, lifted her hand and languidly clutched his nose. "Upon my soul," said David, "she's positively boisterous. There's life in the old dog yet."
"Oh, David, how can you?" said Emma. But she sat watching her husband and child with a placid, gleeful smile. Gradually, her smile grew the least bit serious, and then vanished, though she still looked like the happy woman that she was. The nurse came up from supper, and took possession of the baby. Emma let it go, and remained sitting on the sofa. ”

“ Every one had his particular taste, and at thirty-five years of age John Lennox had no need to be told that Miss Everett was not quite all that she might be. Baxter had thus taken for granted that his friend had designedly selected as his second wife a mere pretty woman—a woman with a genius for receiving company, and who would make a picturesque use of his money. He knew nothing of the serious character of the poor man's passion, nor of the extent to which his happiness was bound up in what the painter would have called his delusion. ”

“ I can easily imagine what these artists find there being intolerable to some people, and in so far as it offers itself as subject matter for painting, can conceive of their having no patience with it. "It is not painting," I hear them say, "and it has nothing to do with painting. It is literature, erudition, edification; it is a superior education, a reminiscence of Oxford, a luxury of culture. Painting is a direct rendering of something seen in the world we live in and look at, we love and admire, and in that sense there is certainly no painting here." ”

“ Graham was three years the elder, slight, undersized, feeble in health, sensitive, indolent, whimsical, generous, and in reality of a far finer clay than his friend, as the latter, moreover, perfectly well knew. Their intimacy was often a puzzle to observers. Disinterested parties were at loss to discover how Osborne had come to set his heart upon an insignificant, lounging invalid, who, in general company, talked in monosyllables, in a weak voice, and gave himself the airs of one whom nature had endowed with the right to be fastidious, without ever having done a stroke of work. ”

“ It was hard to travel without an aim. Yet the intolerable heat made it impossible that he should stay in New York. He might go to Newport.
"A moment," said Osborne. "Has Miss Congreve gone to Newport?"
"Not that I know of."
"Does she intend to go?"
Graham was silent. "Good heavens!" he cried, at last, "forbid it then! All I want is to have it forbidden. I can't forbid it. Did you ever see a human creature so degraded?" he added, with a ghastly smile. "Where shall I go?"
Philip went to his table and began to overhaul a mass of papers fastened with red tape. ”

“ If she had but a treeless moor before her, Slackened with crags, without living thing, save as a lizard crept over the stone, or a little bird flitted in the hot air, or a bee droned in the heather-bloom, she could paint a picture of such exquisite beauty that it would charm beyond a landscape of Italy.
"Nature never did betray the heart that loved her" ”

“ Those readers who were susceptible to the merits of "Jane Eyre" must have felt the charm of keen analysis and descriptive power of the highest order, the easy flow of narrative, and perfect harmony as a whole. But beyond all this they must have been conscious of soundness of tone—notwithstanding the objectionable hero—moral healthfulness, a principle of cheerfulness, and courage, and endurance, and patient endeavor. It is in "Villette" that the greatest trial over self is reached; but in "Jane Eyre" it is evident enough that feeling must be set aside when it comes in conflict with duty. ”

“ Those records of agony from tortured nerves, from heart-hunger, and heartbreak, have a most profound pathos. One of the most sublime spectacles ever seen was her life at that time—a woman of organization so sensitive that she could almost feel it if a shadow crossed the sun, her mortal part wholly disproportioned to the soul it held: "battling with life and death, and grief and fate," sending a shuddering cry along those pages for some human help, some human solace, yet saying amid the thick darkness, "These ills cannot happen without the sanction of God" ”

“ You catch a glimpse of an ivied façade at the midmost point of a great estate, and taking your way, by leave of a decent faced old woman at a lodge gate, along a thickly shadowed avenue, you find yourself confronted with an edifice so comfortably picturesque that it seems to gather up into its aspect all the domestic repose and material luxury that you may ever have dreamed of or envied.
To Broughton castle, the first seen in this beautiful trio, I must do no more than allude; but this is not because I failed to think it the most delightful residence in England. ”

“ To have such a house as Hatfield built for one may seem a rare degree of human felicity; but to build it one's self for one's self adds not a little to the honor and luxury. Built at all events it is in the stateliest fashion, and with the happiest effect to the eye. It is a long red house, with a castellated top and a great many square-bowed windows running vertically from story to story. That is the simplest description that can be given of the front that is turned toward the gateway and park. ”

“ I'm sure it's the best picture you've painted."
"I honestly believe it is. Some parts of it," said Baxter, frankly, "are excellent.
"It's obvious. But either those very parts or others are singularly disagreeable. That word isn't criticism, I know; but I pay you for the right to be arbitrary. They are too hard, too strong, of too frank a reality. In a word, your picture frightens me, and if I were Marian I should feel as if you'd done me a certain violence." ”

“ Osborne had no soul for music, but he stopped and listened, and as he did so, he remembered Graham's passion for the charming art and fancied that these were the very accents that had lured him to his sorrow. Poor Graham! here too, as in all things, he had showed his taste. The singer discharged a magnificent volley of roulades and flourishes and became silent. Osborne, fancying he heard a movement of the lattice of the shutters, slowly walked away. ”

“ Meanwhile poor Lennox had had twelve hours of uninterrupted reflection, and the expression of distress in his eyes had acquired an intensity which, the painter saw, proved it to be of far other import than a mere tribute to his power.
"Can the man be jealous?" thought Baxter. Stephen had been so innocent of any other design than that of painting a good portrait, that his conscience failed to reveal to him the source of his companion's trouble. ”

“ Miss Everett's smile became less mechanical. John had apparently been passing through a crisis—a moral and intellectual crisis, inevitable in a man of his constitution, and with which she had nothing to do. On the eve of marriage he had questioned his heart; he had found that it was no longer young and capable of the vagaries of passion, and he had made up his mind to call things by their proper names, and to admit to himself that he was marrying not for love, but for friendship, and a little, perhaps, for prudence. ”

“ Miss Congreve might perhaps commit herself. Philip flattered himself that he could read very small signs. But what other woman could decently serve as the object of a passion thus extemporized? The only woman Philip could think of was Mrs. Dodd; and to think of Mrs. Dodd was to give it up. For a man who was intimate with Miss Congreve to pretend to care for any other woman (except a very old friend) was to act in flagrant contempt of all verisimilitude. Philip had, therefore, to content himself with playing off his own assumed want of heart against Henrietta's cordial regard. ”