George M. Cohan

“ There's a feeling comes a stealing and sets my brain a reeling,
When I'm list'ning to the music of a military band.
Any tune like "Yankee Doodle" simply sets me off my noodle,
It's that patriotic something that no-one can understand. ”

“ Father was so Yankee-hearted, When the Spanish war was started, He slipped on his uniform and hopped upon a pony. My mother's mother was a Yankee true, My father's father was a Yankee too: And that's going some, For the Yankees, by gum. ”

“ She chaperoned me here."
"Has she a key, also?"
"May I tell him why you came?"
"He put $200,000 in that safe---bribe money for a Mayor Cargan. There's a good story for your paper."
"Mrs. Rhodes is engaged to marry Mayor Cargan."
"May we not stay here to-night---so Mrs. Rhodes can meet Mayor Cargan---and save him?"
"Do you believe in love at first sight?"
"I've written about it a great many times, but never believed it before–Isn't it wonderful!"
"That's not a regular ghost–it's the hermit–Quimby told me all about him." ”

“ The longest-living author of this work died in 1942, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 81 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works. ”

“ It was enough, as relief came in the form of two of Howard’s scouts, Captain S. G. Fisher and J. W. Redington. The latter said, “Who in hell are you?”
“I’m George Cowan of Radersburg.”
“You don’t say! We’ve come to bury you.”
They rendered first aid, provided food, and left Cowan by a roaring fire with the assurance that the main force would gather him up within two days. Mr. Fee has deftly described the abrupt termination of that hard earned felicity:
Cowan ate enough to keep himself alive and lay down in silent joy to sleep the night through. ”

“ When George Cohan, in the "Miracle Man", had the cure that attracted attention to the "new prophet" occur with regard to a lame boy, he was eminently wise in the selection of just the type of case that could very readily be cured that way, and yet the fact that the boy had been lame for years and now walked perfectly made the healer seem a veritable wonder worker. ”

“ It is true that you cannot hear the voice of the hoary breakers in the moonlight,—only the long panting of the cotton-presses, the shouting of the boats calling upon each other through the tropical night, and the ceaseless song of night-birds and crickets. ”

“ The sky was cloudless and the stars shone brilliantly, and as the night wore on to morning the full moon swept up from the bosom of the ocean and spread a broad expanse of silver which made it possible to discover anything within a mile or more in shape of a ship. ”

“ Youth. What idol has displaced you? Girl. A golden one. You fear the world too much. I have seen your noble aspirations fall off, one by one, until the master passion—gain—engrosses you; have I not? Youth. ”

“ Their backs are clad with finest green velvet of old mosses; their limbs are spotted and their tails are tipped with the dead gold or the dead silver of delicate fungi. And the places they most haunt are the loveliest,—high shadowy groves where the uguisu sings in green twilight, above some voiceless shrine with its lamps and its lions of stone so mossed as to seem things born of the soil—like mushrooms. ”

“ I thought our Northern sky narrow and cramped as a vaulted church-roof beside that sky—a sky so softly beautiful, so purely clear in its immensity, that it made one dream of the tenderness of a woman's eyes made infinite. ”

“ Have I not sacrificed my young and ardent admirers for your sake? Have I not crushed out the brightness and gayety of my young life to settle down, and become the slave of a man old enough to be my father? ”

“ And the blue multitudes of the peaks, the perpetual congregation of the mornes, seem to chorus in the vast resplendence,—telling of Nature's eternal youth, and the passionless permanence of that about us and beyond us and beneath,—until something like the fulness of a grief begins to weigh at the heart.... For all this astonishment of beauty, all this majesty of light and form and colour, will surely endure,—marvellous as now,—after we shall have lain down to sleep where no dreams come, and may never arise from the dust of our rest to look upon it. ”

“ In the temple court, in the shadow of the tomb, with the moonlight as a guide, long processions of young girls dance a slow ghostly dance while the vast audience of spectators keeps a perfect stillness. ”

“ If we look upon Hearn as a painter, almost the sole colour of his palette was mummy brown, the powdered flesh of the ancient dead holding in solution their griefs, their hopes, their loves, their yearnings, which he found to sink always to pulselessness, and to end in eternal defeat! ”

“ You can almost feel the warmth of the fierce summer sun shining on that scene of blood and crime, falling on the yellow sands of the arena, drying the dark pools of human blood the wild beasts have left unlapped. ”

“ The wrinkled sand, ever shifting yet ever the same, has the same old familiar patches of vari-coloured weeds and shining rocks along its level expanse: and the thunder-chant of the sea which echoes round the world, eternal yet ever new, is rolling up to heaven. ”

“ Die, die like a dog! Why did you come back here to ruin me, to drag me down from my position, to make me a by-word and a scorn among my neighbors? Why didn't you die in the gutters of your infamous city? ”

“ Break her heart! O, Mary, Mary! For the first time in my life I long for wealth, for then I should have the power to enter the field, and, if I could not win you for myself, at least save you from a heartless man. ”

“ It rose with a splendour that recalled the manner of its setting at Memphis, but of another colour;—an auroral flush of pale gold and pale green bloomed over the long fringe of cottonwood and cypress trees, and broadened and lengthened half-way round the brightening world. The glow seemed tropical, with the deep green of the trees sharply cutting against it; and one naturally looked for the feathery crests of cocoanut palms. ”

“ It is a reflex from beyond the shadow of the Now,—a ghost-light of vanished suns. Unknowingly within that maiden-gaze we meet the gaze of eyes more countless than the hosts of heaven,—eyes otherwhere passed into darkness and dust. ”

“ The high spirits and sophistication of the Cohan revues have not frequently been equalled on our stage, for the whole of Cohan’s talents were poured into them without reserve. The parodies and satire were merciless and spared not even himself; for he took the old jibe about his Yankee-Doodleism and wrote apropos of a show of his which had failed: “Go, get a Flag, For you need it, you need it, you know you need it!” He took138 off Common Clay in swift and expert patter; he destroyed the “song hit” with Down by the Erie ten years earlier and ten times better than the Forty-niners did ”

“ Red is the colour of blood,—a colour allied necessarily from time immemorial with violent mental impressions, whether of war, or love, or the chase, or religious sacrifice. Green itself is the colour of the world. Blue,—the blue of the far away sky,—has necessarily always been for man the colour mysterious and holy,—always associated with those high phenomena of heaven which first inspired wonder and fear of the Unknown. ”

“ For all of these must surely drink the bitter waters of death, though thou shouldst drink the Water of Life. Wherefore desire everlasting youth, when the face of the world itself shall be wrinkled with age, and the eyes of the stars shall be closed by the black fingers of Azrael? ”

“ Just when the fire is raging at its hottest a whistle is heard from the outer darkness and a dozen warriors, lithe and lean, dressed simply in narrow white breech-cloths and moccasins and daubed with white earth so as to look like so many living statues, come bounding through the entrance to the corral that incloses the flaming heap. ”

“ Twenty years may have passed since your ears last caught the thunder of that mighty ode of hexameters which the sea has always sung and will sing forever, since your eyes sought the far line where the vaulted blue of heaven touches the level immensity of rolling water,—since you breathed the breath of the ocean, and felt its clear ozone living in your veins like an elixir. ”

“ You can comprehend how one becomes tired of the very stones of a place,—the odours, the colours, the shapes of Shadows, and the tint of its sky;—and how small irritations become colossal and crushing by years of repetition;—yet perhaps you will not comprehend that one can become weary of a whole system of life, of civilization, even with very limited experience. ”

“ He ever insists on a haunting glimpse of the pain and the renunciation of others, of wasted and long-dead faces and loves, always shrinking from our gaze, pallid in the darkling light of the setting moon, of vanishing loves, grievous story, forgotten myth, and ruined religion. ”

“ When I was marching along, I felt so drawn towards this house, sez I to myself, sez I, here, Bijah, is the place to find rest for your weary bones, and rations for an aching void. And, behold, I find you, my long-lost treasure. (Tries to embrace Polly, who steps aside.) Ah, Polly Primrose, the way you've played tag with that vital organ of my being, the heart that beats for you alone, would frighten any other man, but I've jest made up my mind,—
“A sweetheart's a sweetheart,
As all the world knows,
And Polly's my Polly,
Wherever she goes.”
Polly. Don't be so sure of that, Mr. Bright. ”

“ Do you remember that?”
“The smash was on the Devil’s Slide,” said Coogan.
“That’s it,” cried Carleton. “I knew you’d remember.”
“They’re always there,” said Coogan simply, “always there. It is a bad track. I’m a railroad man and I know. It’s not properly guarded. I’m going to work there and take care of it.”
“Work there?” said Regan, the tears almost in his eyes. “What kind of work? What do you want to do, Chick?”
“Just work there,” said Coogan. “Take care of the Devil’s Slide.”
The super and the master mechanic looked at each other—and averted their eyes. ”

“ An Oriental warmth and glow pervaded him. While his lines were hard ones in the grime and soot and trying weather of Cincinnati, from which his frail body shrank continually, his trend of thought was largely tropical. Perhaps he saw beyond the dusky faces, rolling eyes and broad noses of the people of the Cincinnati levee, the mixed people of the West Indies and the beautiful little ones of Japan, with whom he was destined to live before long. ”

“ Invisible its base remains, being the same delicious tint as the sky: only above the eternal snow-line its dreamy cone appears, seeming to hang, the ghost of a peak, between the luminous land and the luminous heaven,—the sacred and matchless mountain, Fujiyama. ”

“ Then we glided by miles of cotton-fields with their fluttering white bolls; and by the mouths of broad bayous;—past swamps dark with cypress gloom, where the grey alligator dwells, and the grey Spanish moss hangs in elfish festoons from ancient trees;—past orange-trees and live-oaks, pecans and cottonwoods and broad-leaved bananas; while the green of the landscape ever varied, from a green so dark that it seemed tinged with blue to an emerald so bright that it seemed shot through with gold. ”

“ She,—the soul of her! is the ripened passion-flower of the triumph. All the heroisms, the martyrdoms, the immolations of self,—all strong soarings of will through fire and blood to God since humanity began,—conspired to kindle the flame of her higher life. ”

“ You have almost made me believe what you do not believe yourself: that there are souls. I haven't any, I know; but I think you have,—something electrical and luminous inside you that will walk about and see things always. ”

“ Through churchyards creeping with mournful song,
A group was gathered around a board
Heaped with all that wealth could afford,
Or taste could suggest: dishes costly and rare,
Fruits of all climes and all seasons, were there. ”

“ Yet those countless solar fires, with their viewless millions of living planets, must somehow reappear: again the wondrous Cosmos, self-born as self-consumed, must resume its sidereal whirl over the deeps of the eternities. And the love that strives for ever with death shall rise again, through fresh infinitudes of pain, to renew the everlasting battle. ”

“ Regan and Carleton were alone over their pedro at headquarters, except for Spence, the dispatcher, in the next room. It was getting close on to eleven-thirty. The Imperial Limited, westbound, with Coogan in the cab, had pulled out on time an hour and a half before. The game was lagging, and, as usual, the conversation had got around to the engineer, introduced, as it always was, by the master mechanic. “I sure don’t know what to do for the boy,” he said. “I’d like to do something. Talking don’t amount to anything, does it, h’m?—even if you can talk. ”

“ Mary, I wish I had not come here. There’s a power in the old house that makes my heart ache, it awakens such memories! And mother, dear soul, how sadly her bright hopes of her boy have been shattered! Though I have dashed into the city, and been swept along by its hurry and whirl, I have often thought of this quiet house, and ached, fairly ached, to feel mother’s arms around my neck, and her goodnight kiss upon my brow. O, Mary, be tender, very tender with her. Don’t let her hear a word against me. Sometimes I think that fierce temptation will overwhelm me, ruin me, body and soul ”