Else

“ Dividually.—Here must thou be, O Man!
Power to thyself; no Helper hast thou here;
Here keepest thou in singleness thy state:
No other can divide with thee this work:
No secondary hand can intervene
To fashion this ability; 'tis thine,
The prime and vital principle is thine
In the recesses of thy nature, far
From any reach of outward fellowship,
Else is not thine at all. ”

“ Frau Ehrenberg sat with her knitting on the green velvet sofa in the raised bow-window. Opposite her Else was reading a book. The white head of the marble Isis gleamed from out the far dark part of the room behind the piano, while a streak of light from the next room played through the open door over the grey carpet. Else looked up from her book through the window to the high tops of the trees in the Schwarzenberg Park which were waving in the autumn wind and said casually: "We might perhaps ring up George Wergenthin, to know if he's coming this evening." ”

“ He had heard a voice, a voice in his own heart, which had commanded him to seek rest under this tree, and he had neither preferred self-castigation, offerings, ablutions, nor prayer, neither food nor drink, neither sleep nor dream, he had obeyed the voice. To obey like this, not to an external command, only to the voice, to be ready like this, this was good, this was necessary, nothing else was necessary. ”

“ And, though she felt tired, she felt above all things lonely, terribly lonely and useless in a great world, in a great town, a town in which one feels the greatness, uselessness and vast antiquity of things more perhaps than anywhere else. She felt like a little atom of suffering, like an insect, an ant, half-trodden, half-crushed, among the immense domes of Rome, of whose presence out of doors she was subtly conscious. ”

“ In the twilight, when the day's work is done, and the children are asleep, and she comes and sits beside me with her knitting in the lumber-room or under the pear tree in the garden, what princess could look fresher or neater than Elsè, with her smooth fair hair braided like a coronet? ”

“ No one can say what she is to us, the one left entirely to us, to whom we are still the nearest and the dearest, who binds our years together by the unbroken memory of her tender care, and makes us young in her child-like love, and brings into our failing life the activity and interest of mature age by her own life of active benevolence.
Elsè and her household are the delight of our daily life; Eva and Fritz are our most precious and consecrated treasures, and all the rest are good and dear as children can be; but to all the rest we are the grandmother and the grandfather. ”

“ Eager proceeded to tell Miss Honeychurch that on the right lived Mr. Someone Something, an American of the best type—so rare!—and that the Somebody Elses were farther down the hill. "Doubtless you know her monographs in the series of 'Mediæval Byways'? ”

“ Come, my dear Alceste, we are people of the world, let us act like such, whether we are here or elsewhere, it is of no import, I suppose, to the affair which interests you, and which now interests me extremely, since it is yours. ”

“ An English writer says: "In such phrases as anybody else, and the like, else is often put in the possessive case; as, 'anybody else's servant'; and some grammarians defend this use of the possessive case, arguing that somebody else is a compound noun." It is better grammar and more euphonious to consider else as being an adjective, and to form the possessive by adding the apostrophe and s to the word that else qualifies; thus, anybody's else, nobody's else, somebody's else. ”

“ And the grey in his hair, and the furrows on his forehead—those two upright ones when he is thinking—and the firm compression of his mouth, and the hollow on his cheek, seem to me quite as beautiful in their way as our mother's placid brow, and the dear look on her lips, like the dawn of a smile, as if the law of kindness had moulded every curve.
Then, in the second place (perhaps I ought to have said in the first,) we have the "Catechism." And Aunt Elsè says we have no idea, Heinz and I, what a blessing that is to us. We certainly did not always think it a blessing when we were learning it. ”

“ After the fall of the curtain on the second act he got up with a kind of increased self-consciousness, stood up in his seat and looked frequently up to the box in the first tier, from which Frau Ehrenberg nodded to him benevolently, while Else spoke to James, who was standing still behind her with crossed arms. It struck George that he would see James's sister again to-morrow. Did she still often think of that wonderful hour in the park in the afternoon, amid the dark green sultriness of the park, in the warm perfume of the moss and the pines? ”

“ In our pictures of life, we must show the flowering-out of terrible growths which have their roots deep, deep underground. Just how far we shall lay bare the unseemly roots themselves is a matter of discretion and taste, and which none of us are infallible.
The old woman told the whole story of Elsie, of her birth, of her peculiarities of person and disposition, of the passionate fears and hopes with which her father had watched the course of her development. ”

“ There are moments when the most rational have wild hopes, moments when the most habitually self-collected doubt the evidence of their own senses; it was thus in amaze that they gazed upon her countenance, seemingly instinct with life; with the freshness, and fullness, and bloom of life; the color seemed brightening upon her cheeks and lips with life; the eyelashes and the amber ringlets seemed quivering with life, and even as they gazed with amaze the view was obscured by a mist on the glass, and the beautiful countenance veiled from their eyes. Elsie spoke with a voice full of tears. ”

“ Not wrong, Elsie, but probably unworthy. Of course much depends upon the society aimed at. Ambition is, as the poets have often taught us, a fruitful source of woe, humiliation, and remorse, and social ambition is to my mind the pettiest of vanities. ”

“ The doubt, the struggle, and the fear is over. You are safe, Elsie. Your happiness, as far as human foresight can secure it, is insured,” said Alice, as she received Elsie once more from the arms of Magnus, and folded her in her own. ”

“ When you have destroyed me, and planted a thorn in Elsie's heart that'll pierce her through her life long—for you can do that, though she's beyond your power to harm more—how will you like to turn out of this grand place, and count every penny in your pocket? ”

“ If my eyes had been like Elsie's—that liquid blue which looks out upon life with mingled pity and amazement—I might have felt as a girl ought to feel under such conditions; but having large dark eyes, with a bit of a twinkle in them, and being as well able to pilot a bicycle as any girl of my acquaintance, I have inherited or acquired an outlook on the world which distinctly leans rather towards cheeriness than despondency. ”

“ It was fortunate that Elsie’s wise counsel prevailed over your caprice, for many of your griefs proceed from the complete 318 isolation to which you so strangely doom yourself; and until you become a useful member of that society you are so fully fitted to adorn and elevate, you need not hope or expect the peace of mind that results only from the consciousness of having nobly discharged the sacred obligations to God, and to your race. ”

“ There is no medium in my life between the most vulgar realities and the most vaporous fiction, too thin to breathe. Tell me, Elsie, how came you here? Why do you not meet me frankly? What is there to keep you apart from the oldest friend, I am bold to say, you have on earth? Are you an English girl? Are you one of our own New England maidens, with her freedom, and her know-how, and her force, beyond anything that these demure and decorous damsels can know? ”

“ This was the nearest approach to sympathetic relations that Elsie ever had: a kind of dumb intercourse of feeling, such as one sees in the eyes of brute mothers looking on their young. But, subtile as it was, it was narrow and individual; whereas an emotion which can shape itself in language opens the gate for itself into the great community of human affections; for every word we speak is the medal of a dead thought or feeling, struck in the die of some human experience, worn smooth by innumerable contacts, and always transferred warm from one to another. ”

“ The world is not very easily led; and, certainly, only by those who acquire a certain ascendance over it, by some qualifications not entirely of the most common sort.—'
'But still I don't understand,' cried Miss Bydel, 'what it is Miss Ellis means. ”

“ But write to me darling and tell me what it is best to do now. Would it simplify things if we were to be just friends and no more?
“Cheer up, Elsie perhaps some day things may come right for us—who knows? He may die; doesn’t he always say there is something wrong with him? ”

“ Dear Elsie, only in the beginning of this century, before the professors had yet thought out their impossible hypothesis of a dead matter and a soulless Nature, there was a poet who in a few words set forth the wisdom which the professors have forgotten and which they will have to remember again, before we have gone half a century further. ”

“ Better than ever; you are all I have now! Oh, Elsie, don't shut your heart against me, I can't bear that. Try to believe that I have acted as justly as a man could. To the whole world I can be stern and silent, but let me tell you the truth. ”

“ Every one of us—you, Elsie, at your pretty embroidery, you, Dora, at your map drawing, you, Horace, over your chemistry, you, Theobald, deep in Virgil, I, the Post mistress, with my heaps of letters—every one of us, my dears, is liable sometimes to be in the wrong. We say something hastily, and hurt somebody's feelings, and then we are sorry. ”

“ Elsie, she had done her work, and was waiting for your father to come home, so I could get some money to pay her; for I should be ashamed to keep her out of her money, or oblige her to call again. You had spent all the change I had in the house in your afternoon shopping. It was me that asked her to stay. It was me that asked her into the parlor. It was me, your mother, that asked her to sing one of those plaintive, sweet songs, I had heard her sing to the children while at work. It was you that urged her. What for? That she might fail. Elsie, Elsie, there is envy in your heart. ”

“ I smoothed her golden hair. 'Elsie, dear,' I said gently, gazing into her blue eyes, 'you are a woman. A woman can always be brave, where those she loves are concerned; and I believe you love me.' I led her, coaxingly, to the edge. ”

“ Yet both Elsie and I feel that he cares for us as much as ever. And, indeed, poor fellow, he himself remains strangely lovable, in spite of what one must—alas!—believe as to his ways of life and the people with whom he associates. ”

“ You are too generous and large-hearted to feel anger or contempt at their unrefined method of expressing their sympathy, which is really more sincere and earnest than all the congratulations in elegant phrases that ladies and gentlemen give and receive upon such occasions. Let us have patience with uncultivated Nature, dear Elsie, for we are going to live with her a long time. At least, have any other feeling for humanity rather than contempt, dear Elsie,” replied Magnus, as he finished arranging her cloak. ”

“ Great indeed is the power, marvellous is the mystery, of the limner's art.
'Now,' Elsie murmured, 'you look like some great philanthropist—a thoughtful philanthropist, not a foolish person: your high forehead and your sharp nostril proclaim that you are no impulsive gusher: your kindly eyes beam with goodness of heart: your lips are firm because you hate injustice. Oh, my dear guardian, how much I have improved you! ”

“ Elsie made the reply which of late was becoming habitual in her talks with him.
"Don't begin to be peculiar, Herbert. You are too young to be peculiar. Leave that to old people!" and Elsie's mind glided off from the loaves and the fishes of Galilee to certain old people of her neighborhood from whose eccentricities she extracted acrid amusement. ”

“ But sometimes it would seem as if the more a heart was made capable of loving, the less it had to love; and poor Elsie, in passing from a mother’s to a brother’s guardianship, felt a change of spiritual temperature too keen. ”

“ But not that we are human beings; thank Heaven forever that you did not look upon the sight my eyes saw a moment ago. Let it suffice, doctor, to say that of the three men and women to whom we bade good-bye within the past twenty minutes not one is alive! ”

“ These were the most precious moments of all to the teacher, when the formal lesson was completed, and he sat down for a little talk with his pupil. He occupied the stone which served her for a seat, while one arm loosely clasped the figure which stood between his knees. She patted his cheek, played with his rough collar and shaggy whiskers, while as he listened and replied to her prattle, felt as never before the truth of the declaration that of such is the kingdom of heaven.
“Mr. Brush,” she finally said, “do you know why I love you?” ”

“ I feel it to be truly inimitable. Yet such was the impression made on my mind by some of YOUR HONOUR’s late reasonings respecting the Scrutiny, that I could not withstand the involuntary impulse of endeavouring, for my own improvement, to attain some faint likeness of that wonderful pertinency and cogency, which I so much admired in the great original. ”

“ To-day I have put the last strokes to a History of Testimony from the Christian era down to the sixth century—from Livy to Gregory of Tours, from Augustus to Justinian.'
Elsmere turned to him with wonder, with a movement of irrepressible homage. Thirty years of unbroken solitary labour for one end, one cause! In our hurried fragmentary life, a purpose of this tenacity, this power of realising itself, strikes the imagination. ”