Georg Wilhelm Steller

“ Peters, founded on the examination of the typical skulls, Otaria ursina of Nilsson and Otaria Lemarii of J. Müller (Arch. f. Naturg. 1841, p. 334) include the Arctocephalus antarcticus from South Africa and A. cinereus of Australia.
Otaria Stelleri of Schlegel (Fauna Japonica, t. 22. f. 55) includes both the Australian Eared Seals, viz. Arctocephalus cinereus and Neophoca lobata; and it is quite distinct from the Otaria Stelleri of Lesson and T. Müller, which is a combination of the Sea-bear and Sea-lion of Steller (that is to say, Eumetopias Stelleri and Callorhinus ursinus) . ”

“ Stern drew the rude boat up. Then, breathing deep, he faced the morning.
“You and I, Beatrice,” said he, and took her hand. “Just you--and I!”
“And love!” she whispered.
“And hope, and life! And the earth reborn. The arts and sciences, language and letters, truth, ‘all the glories of the world’ handed down through us!
“Listen! The race of men, our race, must live again--shall live! Again the forests and the plains shall be the conquest of our blood. Once more shall cities gleam and tower, ships sail the sea, and the world go on to greater wisdom, better things! ”

“ Serlo made a jest of this perplexity: "We should be in a pretty scrape," said he, "if the Ghost were to decline appearing, and the guard had nothing to fight with but the air, and our prompter were obliged to speak the spirit's part from the side-scenes."
"We will not scare away our strange friend by unbelief," said Wilhelm: "doubtless at the proper season he will come, and astonish us as much as the spectators."
"Well, certainly," said Serlo, "I shall be a happy man to-morrow night, when once the play will have been acted. It costs us more arrangement than I dreamed of." ”

“ All these circumstances and events would be very fit for expanding and lengthening a novel; but here they injure exceedingly the unity of the piece, [267] particularly as the hero has no plan, and are, in consequence, entirely out of place."
"For once in the right!" cried Serlo.
"Do not interrupt me," answered Wilhelm: "perhaps you will not always think me right. These errors are like temporary props of an edifice: they must not be removed till we have built a firm wall in their stead. ”

“ The young are cinnamon-colored, and when they are born they look much like female fur seals, and are almost as large. And when the old males are fighting they toddle away, else
they will be crushed under the rocks, or trampled on by huge, flappy feet.
But most interesting of all the great beasts of the sea was the one Steller called the sea bear, "Ursus Marinus," or, as men now call it, the "fur seal." These creatures came on shore by the thousands on the west coast of Bering island, when the ice left the island in the spring. ”

“ Sterne’s body, as if rooted on the spot, trembled slightly from top to toe with the internal vibration of the ship; from under his feet came sometimes a sudden clang of iron, the noisy burst of a shout below; to the right the leaves of the tree-tops caught the rays of the low sun, and seemed to shine with a golden green light of their own shimmering around the highest boughs which stood out black against a smooth blue sky that seemed to droop over the bed of the river like the roof of a tent. ”

“ He was larger than the Waern boy, and more strongly built. But he was very little older—and definitely no giant. He was at least fifteen centimeters shorter than Stern himself, and much lighter. Looked, Stern decided, like a galactic. He felt a surge of hatred.
No little man could dare defy him!
He tilted his head a little and looked downward into the warden's eyes.
"Your duties are to protect the person of this boy, so long as he is a legitimate claimant for the throne," he said contemptuously, "not to advise him. Your presence here is merely required by tradition, not by real need." ”

“ At this moment Serlo entered, most unwelcomely, and, most unexpectedly, Philina, with her hand in his. "Here is your friend," said he to her: [225] "he will be glad to welcome you."
"What!" cried Wilhelm in astonishment: "are you here?" With a modest, settled mien, she went up to him; bade him welcome; praised Serlo's goodness, who, she said, without merit on her part, but purely in the hope of her improvement, had agreed to admit her into his accomplished troop. She behaved, all the while, in a friendly manner towards Wilhelm, yet with a dignified distance. ”

“ Stern kissed the dead side while his wife called a doctor, who said, "You've never called me before. I don't come in the middle of nights unless you're a regular patient." Stern said he would call the man and rehearsed the things he would say to him, that he had no right to call himself a doctor, that he was a peasant son of a bitch, that if he wasn't a doctor he would be selling diseased poultry to housewives. What kind of a man was he who could go to sleep while a child's fever rose and his face grew large and moonlike? ”

“ Steller, who had cursed him for not remaining longer at Mount St. Elias, bore the highest testimony to his integrity and worth. It may be said that a stronger type of hero would have scrunched into nothingness the vampire blunderers who misled the ship; but it must be remembered that stronger types of heroes usually save their own skins and let the underlings suffer. While Bering might have averted the disaster that attended the expedition, it must not be forgotten that when he perished, there perished the very soul of the great enterprise, which at once crumbled to pieces. ”

“ She desired him to cast away anxiety, and to expect the Ghost with patience.
Serlo, for most part, was in excellent humor: the actors that were going to leave him took all possible pains to play well, that their absence might be much regretted; and this, combined with the new-fangled zeal of the others, gave promise of the best results.
His intercourse with Wilhelm had not failed to exert some influence on him. He began to speak more about art: for, after all, he was a German; and Germans like to give themselves account of what they do. Wilhelm wrote down many of their conversations ”

“ When a herd of sealions are driven into the sea, they will rise out of the surf at once and all together, roaring in chorus. Such a wonderful chorus can be heard nowhere else on earth, and it is no wonder that the lion of the sea made a great impression on Steller. The sealions live in families on the rocks, where the males fight for supremacy, often overturning huge boulders in their struggles. ”

“ Better, far better, had it been for you, John Sterling, to be instructed by a simple parish priest bred among the mountains, and ministering in that church which is the pillar and ground of the truth, than be handed over as you were by Coleridge, Maurice, and Hare, to Strauss, Mill, and Carlyle—from unbelief in the bud to unbelief in full, gaudy, flaunting blossom.
We cannot discover anything imposing in Sterling's talents. Even in secular learning he was a reed shaken by the wind. His essays and poems want definite view and bold outline. ”

“ We're Americans, I tell you--Americans! For God's sake, can't you understand?”
Once more the word “Merucaans” passed round from mouth to mouth; but beyond this Stern got no sign of comprehension.
“Village! Houses!” shouted he. “Shelter! Rest, eat, sleep!”
They merely shoved him forward up the slope, together with the girl; and now Stern saw a curious kind of causeway, paved with slippery, wet, black stones that gleamed in the torchlight, a causeway slanting sharply upward, its further end hidden in the dense vapor behind which the great and unknown light shone with ever-clearer glowing. ”

“ Seltzer might have been good-looking had his eyes not possessed the shifting, uncertain glance that plays before a soul which dares not frankly meet its fellows, and had not an evil expression predominated on his features. ”

“ Beatrice, still strong, and full of vigorous, pulsing life, in spite of the long vigil in the tree and the hard night of work, curled up at the foot of the rough mast, on the mass of fir-tips Stern had piled there.
“You steer, boy,” said she, “and I'll go to work on making some kind of sail out of the big skin. By morning we ought to have our little craft under full control.”
“It's one beautiful boat, isn't it?” mocked Stern, poling off from a gaunt hulk that barred the way. ”

“ A number dropped the ropes, while others reached for the slings and spears that always lay in the bottoms of the canoes.
“What the devil now?” shouted Stern. “You all gone crazy, or what?”
He turned appealingly to the old man.
“For Heaven's sake, what's up?” he cried. “Tell me, can't you, before the idiots drop my machine and ruin the whole thing? What--”
“Misfortune, O my son!” cried the patriarch in a strange, trembling voice. “The worst that could befall! In our absence he has come back--he, Kamrou! And under pain of death he bids all men abandon every task and haste to homage. ”

“ He circumstantially delivered to his hearers the opinions we before saw him busied with; taking all the trouble possible to make his notion of the matter acceptable, sceptical as Serlo showed himself regarding it. "Well, then," said the latter finally, "suppose we grant you all this, what will you explain by it?"
"Much, every thing," said Wilhelm. "Conceive a prince such as I have painted him, and that his father suddenly dies. Ambition and the love of rule are not the passions that inspire him. As a king's son, he would have been contented ”

“ That Stella was a born artiste all agreed—even her agent, that fat cigar-smoking Hebrew cynic who regarded all stage women as mere cattle out of whom he extracted commissions. To-day nobody can earn unusual emoluments in any profession without real merit assisted by a capable agent.
Stella Steele was believed by all to be thoroughly British. Nobody had ever suspected that her real name was Drost, nor that her bespectacled and pious father had been born in Stuttgart, and had afterwards become naturalised as a Dutchman before coming to England. ”

“ The life at Sellanraa was having its effect on him again; it was an inglorious, commonplace life, but quiet and dulling to the sense, a dreamy life; there was nothing for him to show off about, a looking-glass was a thing he had no use for. ”

“ Wilhelm was still in that happy season when one cannot understand how, in the woman one loves, in the writer one honors, there should be any thing defective. The feeling they excite in us is so entire, so accordant with itself, that we cannot help attributing the same perfect harmony to the objects themselves. Serlo again was willing to discriminate, perhaps too willing: his acute understanding could usually discern in any work of art nothing but a more or less imperfect whole. ”

“ The blow that had so shrewdly clipped Stern's skull must have inevitably killed, as an ox is dropped in the slaughter-house, a man less powerfully endowed with splendid energies and full vitality.
Even Stern's wonderful physique had a hard fight to regain its finely ripened forces. But day by day he gained--we must speak of days, though there were only sleeping-times and waking-times--until at length, upon the fifth, he was able for the first time to leave his seaweed bed and sit a while weakly on the patriarch's bench, with Beatrice beside him. ”

“ Stern blessed fate for this. If any such had existed, he knew human nature well enough to feel certain that, there in the eternal gloom and fog, the race would soon have given itself over to excesses and have miserably perished.
“To my mind,” he said to Beatrice, one time, “the survival of our race under such conditions is one of the most marvelous things possibly to be conceived.” Out toward the black and mist-hidden sea that rolled forever in the gloom he gestured from the wall where they were standing.
“Imagine!” he continued. “No sunlight--for centuries! ”

“ The telescope showed only a stray, lolling mast of steel, here or yonder, thrusting up from the desolation, like a mute appealing hand raised to a Heaven that responded not.
“See,” remarked Stern, “up-town almost all the buildings seem to have crumbled in upon themselves, or to have fallen outward into the streets. What an inconceivable tangle of detritus those streets must be!
“And, do you notice the park hardly shows at all? Everything's so overgrown with trees you can't tell where it begins or ends. Nature has her revenge at last, on man!”
“The universal claim, made real,” said Beatrice. ”

“ At such crises a few rods count immensely, and they were made to count on the side of Mont Sterry.
They were insufficient, however, to take him beyond peril. Men like those horsemen are quick to recover from a surprise, and it would have seemed that Sterry was hardly started in his flight when they were speeding after him. He heard their maledictions and knew that the struggle for life was on. ”

“ But the mass of them now outwardly seemed so eager to serve and care for him, so quick to obey, so grateful almost to adoration, that Stern felt ashamed of his own suspicions and of the revolver that he still always carried whenever outside the patriarch's hut.
And in his heart he buried his fears as unworthy delusions, as the imaginings of a brain still hurt. The occasional black looks of one or another of the people, or perchance some sullen, muttered word, he set down as the crude manners of a primitive and barbarous race. ”

“ Light metal blades, well-shaped and riveted to iron handles, served for propulsion.
Stern lay back, still faint and sick with the shock of the fall and with the pain, humiliation and excitement of the capture. Yet through it all he rejoiced that the girl and he had escaped with life and were both still sound of limb and faculty.
Even the loss of the machine could not destroy all his natural enthusiasm, or kill his satisfaction in this great adventuring, his joy at having found after all, a remnant of the human race once more.
“Men, by the Almighty!” ”