Consols

“ Happy and religious folk, who have only died in theory, contemplating distant death, knowing him only as opportune among kinsfolk owning Consols, these may hope for a Prayer–book end, sacrament administered, weeping friends, the heavenward soul glad to fly through the golden door, animula, vagula, blandula, yet assured of its reception with a heavenly smile of foretaste—this may be ”

“ Dark lowers the night o'er the wide stormy main,
Till mild rosy morning rise cheerful again
Alas! morn returns to revisit the shore;
But Connel returns to his Flora no more.
For see o'er yon mountain the dark cloud of death,
And Connel's lone cottage lies low on the heath,
While bloody and pale, on a far distant shore,
He lies to return to his Flora no more.
Ye light-fleeting spirits that glide o'er yon steep! ”

“ But when the last day of the month of waiting came, Connla stood by the side of the king his father on the Plain of Arcomin, and again he saw the maiden come towards him, and again she spoke to him.
"'Tis a glorious place, forsooth, that Connla holds among short-lived mortals awaiting the day of death. But now the folk of life, the ever-living ones, beg and bid thee come to Moy Mell, the Plain of Pleasure, for they have learnt to know thee, seeing thee in thy home among thy dear ones." ”

“ If you and your sons will get me the brown horse of the king of Lochlann, you shall get the souls of your sons."
"Why," said Conall, "should not I do the pleasure of the king, though there should be no souls of my sons in dread at all. Hard is the matter you require of me, but I will lose my own life, and the life of my sons, or else I will do the pleasure of the king." ”

“ And in me an emotion was born similar to that which I should doubtless have felt if, in the same place, beneath the familiar elms, that shed their dead flowers, I had seen Constance, the poor sister, side by side with Federico.
The elms rained thousands of flowers at every breath of the wind. There was, in the white light, a continual and very slow rain of diaphanous, almost impalpable pellicles, that loitered in the air, hesitating, trembling like the wings of dragon-flies, of an indefinable color between green and blond, and whose incessant fall imparted a sensation of vertigo. ”

“ Then the maiden answered, "Connla speaks to a young, fair maid, whom neither death nor old age awaits. I love Connla, and now I call him away to the Plain of Pleasure, Moy Mell, where Boadag is king for aye, nor has there been complaint or sorrow in that land since he has held the kingship. Oh, come with me, Connla of the Fiery Hair, ruddy as the dawn with thy tawny skin. A fairy crown awaits thee to grace thy comely face and royal form. Come, and never shall thy comeliness fade, nor thy youth, till the last awful day of judgment." ”

“ It has not the learning of "The Hay Wain" or "The Leaping Horse," and the steady flame of Constable's fame would probably long ago have been extinguished had it depended for existence entirely upon his sketches; but, speaking for myself, it is to his sketches that I go for joy. Verily this student of Nature, who disliked autumn and loved spring; who painted summer, "its breezes, its heat, its heavy colouring," its gusts of winds, its sudden storms; verily he lives in our hearts wherever our eyes meet his sketches. ”

“ These are scenes where we could melt our whole nature down to love: Nature never meant us for the stern and arid destinies we fulfil. Look round, Constance, in every leaf of her gorgeous book, how glowingly is written the one sentence, ‘Love and be happy!’ You answer not; to these thoughts you are cold.”
“They breathe too much of the Epicurean and his rose-leaves for me,” answered Constance, smilingly. “I love better that stern old tower, telling of glorious strife and great deeds, than all the softer landscape, on which the present debasement of the south seems written.” ”

“ And now to make a conclusion to my tale, this child, Maurice, was afterwards anointed Emperor by the Pope, and did high honour to the Christian church:—but my story is especially of Constance.
King Alla after due time returned to England with his sweet and holy wife, where they lived together in peace and happiness, although, alas! but for a short, though blissful season: happiness in this world is ever fleeting, and so it was with Alla and Constance; for, at the end of a year, death removed him from her; and she, in grief and heaviness at his loss, returned to the land of her birth. ”

“ Nothing is left to the imagination, everything is stated, every inch of canvas is painted with equal force, yet what an advance it is upon most of the classical landscapes then in vogue. It is a picture of England, ripe, lush, carefully composed, carefully executed, but fresh as are the meadows on the banks of the Stour; and the sky across which the large clouds are drifting is sunny. This picture was bought in at the Constable sale, held the year after his death, in 1838, for the very modest sum of thirty-three guineas. ”

“ But the wind blew all the time, kept on blowing from some mysterious cloud-realm, carrying the clouds with it, violet clouds and grey clouds, a never-ending succession, which came sailing over the trees in the Woods as though over the sea. And Constance followed them with her eyes, vaguely and dreamily, dreaming on and on in an endless reverie. The clouds sailed everlastingly on the wind; and the wind blew everlastingly, like an everlasting storm, not always raging, but always rustling, sometimes high up above the trees, sometimes straight through the trees themselves. ”

“ And to be thrown with her daily—to spend the bright summer mornings in the cool, old drawing-room with Constance, listening to the pleasant, languid talk of people in a country house, the shady afternoons in driving over the rich, green, placid country, sometimes with Constance by his side—the deep, blue nights, sitting on the great stone porch, watching the silver moon rise over the distant pine-crowned mountain-peaks, and looking at Constance, in a thin white gown, seeming as young by night as in those sweet Italian nights long past—it would have been bliss but for two things. ”

“ He hath brought me now to Constance without let or hindrance; for although I rode the whole way dressed as a priest without disguise, and in all the towns called out my name in a loud voice, I met no open enemy; in fact, I should not have many enemies in Constance if the Bohemian clergy, in their greed for livings and their bondage to avarice, had not been leading people astray on the journey. [5] Yet I trust to the mercy of the Saviour and to your prayers that I shall stand firm in God’s truth unto death. ”

“ But when the screaming of the gulls came over the loch, and the plaintive crying of the lapwings was upon the moorland, and the smell of loneroid and bracken was heavy in the wind-fallen stillness, Ulad turned, for he felt a touch upon his shoulder.
It was Connla who touched him, and he knew the man. He had the old wisdom of knowing all that is in the mind by looking into the eyes, and he knew how the man had come there.
“Let the men who are your men, O Connla, move away from here in their birlinn, and go farther up into the haven.” ”

“ It was probably in a mood like this that the poet turned from his devotion to an earthly love and began to write his "Sonnets in honor of God and his Saints." In this group, as in the other, he expresses that passion for beauty characteristic of the renaissance, but here he shows the lack of a clear conception as to where the line should be drawn between earthly and heavenly beauty. In Constable we see the new revelation barely emerging from the darkness, the human hand reaching out in art toward the divine, but not knowing how to take and hold the higher in its grasp. ”

“ Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 30 Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' 32 For the Gentiles seek after all these things ”

“ But here on the stream of the Concord, where we have all the while been bodily, Nature, who is superior to all styles and ages, is now, with pensive face, composing her poem Autumn, with which no work of man will bear to be compared.
In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. ”

“ The Spaniard? " cried the young singers with one voice, all amazement. Then a universal burst of Homeric laughter drove a flush of indignation and anger to the majestic brow of the professor.
Little Consuelo, whose stopped ears had not heard a word of this dialogue, and whose eyes were wandering about without seeing anything, so absorbed was she by her work, remained unconscious of the disturbance for some minutes. Then, perceiving at last the attention of which she was the object, she dropped her hands from her ears to her knees, and her books from her knees to the floor. ”

“ CONSUS, an ancient Italian deity, originally a god of agriculture. The time at which his festival was held (after harvest and seed-sowing) , the nature of its ceremonies and amusements, his altar at the end of the Circus Maximus always covered with earth except on such occasions, all point to his connexion with the earth. In accordance with this, the name has been derived from condere (= Condius, as the “keeper” of grain or the “hidden” god, whose life-producing influence works in the depths of the earth) . ”

“ If the ascent of the rock is difficult, the descent on the side of Cascia is quite impossible, from whence it is believed that when the four saints had accomplished the difficult ascent they were either borne through the air from mountain to mountain, or else passed without pause to their intended goal, as if to signify the liberty enjoyed by all who reach the highest point of perfection and have climbed the mount of God. ”

“ It seemed like one of those mountains of snow, which I have heard of, falling in the Alps, where, though they be seen thundering down, 'tis vain to fly, or move, or think; for their coming is too rapid, their extent too wide; and all that remains is to call upon the name of God and die."
"Good Heaven, what an image!" exclaimed Constance; "and have you really suffered all this, my poor Iola?--But now tell me what has passed between you and Lord Chartley?" ”

“ Do you feel as you felt that day when you were with my sister and me in the garden?"
"Oh no."
"You are not ill, you are not really affected by the heat—and yet you turn as pale as ashes, and you are obliged to leave the quadrille! There must be some reason for this." ”

“ Colossal tropical trees—with rank creepers twining endlessly about their trunks, and hideous stone idols glimmering and grinning at intervals behind leaves and stalks and branches—surrounded the temple and shut out the sky, and threw a dismal shadow over the forlorn band of men on the steps. White exhalations twisted and curled up stealthily from the ground, approached the men in wreaths like smoke, touched them, and stretched them out dead, one by one, in the places where they lay. ”

“ The king did not appear to be in the least perturbed; he gave the prince a fatherly pat on his shoulder and winked at the Emperor of Zabonia.
“He’s only twenty-three and a few days,” explained the king, “so naturally he takes it a bit hard. I did myself—thought of entering a monastery—yes, really.”
His Zabonian Serenity chuckled deep in his cavern of chest.
“Ernie,” said the king, turning to his son, and speaking in his most kindly manner, “you’ve discovered what all kings discover sooner or later. You’ve found yourself out. Now your job will be to keep the people from finding you out. ”

“ That was a fine saying of Solon's," he mused, "an heroic reply to the news of his son's death, 'I knew that I had begotten a mortal being.' Or was it Anaxagoras, as some say, or Xenophon? But that is the pathos of the past; the truth of matters becomes obscured." ”

“ I came to the resolution of taking a house for myself, and discovered my intention to M. de Sonnes. Both he and his aunt opposed me in vain; I remained immoveable to their wishes and entreaties. Clementine alone neither appeared nor entreated, but she became more serious, and, as I thought, more sad.
“You are very cruel,” said Madame de Sonnes one day to me; “what have we done to offend you, that you wish to punish us so severely? You will take with you the peace of our house, until now so happy. We all love you, leave us not, I beseech you.” ”

“ Are they all safely here?" cried Constance.
"Every man of them; we had a fine expedition, not a misfortune, perfect weather, and we saw wonders of noble country: streams and hills and plains," said Giles, and instantly Constance felt a new manhood and self-confidence in him, steadier, less assertive than his boyish pride, the self-reliance that is won through encountering realities, in conquering self and hence things outside of self. ”

“ All that was slightly grotesque in his outer man, the broad flat head, the red hair, the sharp wedge-like chin, disappeared for Constance in the single impression of his eyes—pale blue, intensely melancholy, and most human.
“Take up some occupation—some study—” he said to her gently. “You won’t be long here; but still, ask us for what we can give. In Oxford one must learn something—or teach something. If not, life here goes sour.”
Constance repeated Sorell’s promise to teach her Greek. ”