Howth

“ Gerty wished to goodness they would take their squalling baby home out of that and not get on her nerves no hour to be out and the little brats of twins. She gazed out towards the distant sea. It was like the paintings that man used to do on the pavement with all the coloured chalks and such a pity too leaving them there to be all blotted out, the evening and the clouds coming out and the Bailey light on Howth and to hear the music like that and the perfume of those incense they burned in the church like a kind of waft. ”

“ One day he had quarrelled with Frank and after that she had to meet her lover secretly.
The evening deepened in the avenue. The white of two letters in her lap grew indistinct. One was to Harry; the other was to her father. Ernest had been her favourite but she liked Harry too. Her father was becoming old lately, she noticed; he would miss her. Sometimes he could be very nice. Not long before, when she had been laid up for a day, he had read her out a ghost story and made toast for her at the fire. Another day, when their mother was alive, they had all gone for a picnic to the Hill of Howth. ”

“ The delight of reading a new novel by Howells is something that you evidently have not the remotest idea of. Why, I don’t know what I would give to have with me a novel of Howells’ that I had not read. ”

“ For the second time since coming into the North he felt the blood leaping through his veins as on that first night in Prince Albert when from the mountain he had heard the lone wolf, and when later he had seen the beautiful face through the hotel window. Howland was one of the few men who possess unbounded confidence in themselves, who place a certain pride in their physical as well as their mental capabilities, and he was confident now. ”

“ Erroneous judgment of others is almost certain to mark the conclusions of such a man's mind; and it is no wonder that Mr. Howland erred in his conclusions respecting the true character of his daughter's husband, who had in him many good qualities, and was sincerely attached to Mary. The great defect appertaining to him, was the fact that he was not a church member. Mr. Howland did not look past the veil of a profession, to see if there was in the ground work of the young man's character a basis of right principles—the only true foundation upon which a religious structure can be built. ”

“ She acted on this superstition as if it were a religion.
"If it had not been for my despair, as you call it, Alma," she answered, "I don't know where we should have been now."
"I suppose we should have been in St. Barnaby," said the girl. "And if it's worse to be in New York, you see what your despair's done, mamma. But what's the use? You meant well, and I don't blame you. You can't expect even despair to come out always just the way you want it. Perhaps you've used too much of it." The girl laughed, and Mrs. Leighton laughed, too. ”

“ I have, potentially, improved immensely and am bursting with ideas and subjects—though the act of composition is with me more and more slow, painful and difficult. I shall never again write a long novel; but I hope to write six immortal short ones—and some tales of the same quality. Forgive, my dear Howells, the cynical egotism of these remarks—the fault of which is in your own sympathy. Don't fail me this summer. I shall probably not, as usual, absent myself from these islands—not be beyond the Alps as I was when you were here last. ”

“ Howland came, treading carefully and speaking low, as his sister, pointing to the sleeping girl, bade him not to wake her.
“Look at her, though. Isn’t she pretty?” she whispered, and Mr. Howland, gazing upon the fair, childish face, felt that he had seldom seen a more beautiful picture.
In a few words Miss Elinor told why she was there, adding, in conclusion:
“But you won’t take it, of course. You are rich enough without it, and it will do them so much good.” ”

“ Society had just been stirred by the reading of a certain book, which had then a very great vogue, and several people had been down among the wretched at the North End doing good in a conscience-stricken effort to avert the millennium which the book in question seemed to threaten. ”

“ In a loud voice Hasketh began to say that they had a carriage down at the gate, and I said they had better let me show them the way down; and as my wife followed the others into the hall, I pulled open the outer door for them. On the threshold stood a man about to ring, who let his hand drop from the bell-pull. "Why, Tedham!" I shouted, joyfully.
The light from the hall-lamp struck full on his face; we all involuntarily shrank back, except the girl, who looked, not at the man before her, but first at her aunt and then at her uncle, timorously, and murmured some inaudible question. ”

“ In this he was strictly of New England, and he was of New England in a certain general intelligence, which constantly grew with an interrogative habit of mind.
He liked to talk to you of what he had found characteristic in your work, to analyze you to yourself; and the very modesty of the man, which made such a study impersonal as far as he was concerned, sometimes rendered him insensible to the sufferings of his subject. He had a keen perception of humor in others, but he had very little humor ”

“ But I do not by any means allow that this narrowness is a defect, while denying that it is a universal characteristic of our fiction; it is rather, for the present, a virtue. Indeed, I should call the present American work, North and South, thorough rather than narrow. In one sense it is as broad as life, for each man is a microcosm, and the writer who is able to acquaint us intimately with half a dozen people, or the conditions of a neighborhood or a class, has done something which cannot in any, bad sense be called narrow ”

“ Richard Howland’s home was very beautiful, overlooking, as it did, the town and the surrounding country, and the passers-by often stopped to admire its winding walks, its fountains, its grassy plats, graceful evergreens, and wealth of flowers, the latter of which were the especial pride of the stately Miss Elinor, the maiden sister, who was mistress of the house, for Richard Howland had no wife, and on the night when we first introduce him to our readers, he was seated in his pleasant sitting-room, with his sister at his side, and every possible comfort and luxury around him. ”

“ Holding so firmly to his religion of reality, and with his varied powers, it is not perhaps to be wondered at that Howells produced in his fourscore books the most considerable transcript of American life yet made by one man. ”

“ When he brought it back, a sheaf of very admirable notes, but by no means great in quantity, I felt the charm of the material; the wild poetry of its reality was not unknown to me; I was at home with it, for I had known the belated backwoods of a certain region in Ohio; I had almost lived the pioneer life; and I wrote the little book with none of the reluctance I felt from studying its sources. I will not pretend that I had any prescience of the greatness, the tragical immortality, that underlay the few simple, mostly humble, facts brought to my hand. ”

“ A new and different expression passed over the face of the gentleman before her. Her chin still rested in her hand, her other arm, long, round, white, lay out upon the table before him. He could see straight into her wide eyes, see the heave of her throat now under its shining circlet, see the color of her cheek, feel the tenseness of all her mind and body as she questioned him about his long forgotten past.
"Why do you ask me this?" he demanded at last. "What has that to do with us? That was long ago. It is dead, it is forgotten. ”

“ The lady of General Howe lived to an advanced age, long surviving her husband, and, at her death, left behind her many curious pieces of mechanism of her father’s constructing, who was a distinguished mechanic and artist, as well as warrior ”

“ They began to amass maps and guides. She got a Baedeker for Austria and he got a Bradshaw for the continent, which was never of the least use there, but was for the present a mine of unavailable information. He got a phrase-book, too, and tried to rub up his German. He used to read German, when he was a boy, with a young enthusiasm for its romantic poetry, and now, for the sake of Schiller and Uhland and Heine, he held imaginary conversations with a barber, a bootmaker, and a banker, and tried to taste the joy which he had not known in the language of those poets for a whole generation. ”

“ Your instinct prophesied, after any signal event, that he must and would feel and think justly and clearly of it, and so, in your rare encounters, there was no time lost. I myself in my literary quality wasted little or none of it in trying to reach him in his historical quality of German revolutionist, Western politician, Northern general, American statesman, New York editor. I knew that these were all his genuine and characteristic phases, and no mere masks; and that a thousand deeds and words bore witness of his intense vitality in each. ”

“ So she went on turning substance into shadow,—unless, indeed, flesh and blood is the illusion,—and, as I am bound to own, catching at very slight pretexts in many cases for the exercise of her sorcery, when her eye fell upon a gentleman at a little distance. At the same moment he raised his eyes from a letter at which he had been glancing, and ran them along the row of houses opposite, till they rested on the window at which she stood. Then he smiled and lifted his hat, and, with a start, she recognized Mr. Arbuton, while a certain chill struck to her heart through the tumult she felt there. ”

“ The others said they none of them knew, either, and would like to know, and the gentleman began by saying that he had been going over the matter in his mind on his way to dinner, and he had really been trying to lead up to it ever since we sat down. “I've been struck, first of all, by the fact, in our evolution, that we haven't socially evolved from ourselves; we've evolved from the Europeans, from the English. I don't think you'll find a single society rite with us now that had its origin in our peculiar national life, if we have a peculiar national life ”

“ March faced her open book down on the table before her, and looked at me with profound solemnity. “Well, then, I can tell you, my dear, it is no laughing matter. If they have got to the weird it is very serious; and her talking to him about her family, and his wanting to know about her father, that’s serious too—far more serious than either of them can understand. I don’t like it, Basil; we have got a terrible affair on our hands.” ”

“ The landlady smiled. They were certainly a very pretty-appearing young couple, and the gentleman was evidently up-and-coming. Mrs. Nash liked Bartley, as most people of her grade did, at once. “It's always be'n my exper'ence,” she explained, with the lazily rhythmical drawl in which most half-bred New-Englanders speak, “that I seemed to get along rather better with gentlemen. They give less trouble—as a general rule,” she added, with a glance at Marcia, as if she did not deny that there were exceptions, and Marcia might be a striking one. ”

“ The people who pushed upward to seize the great hand held out to every one looked mostly like the country folk such as he had been of, and the best of him always was, and I could hear their hoarse or cracked voices as they hailed him, oftenest in affectionate joking, sometimes in fervent blessing; but for anything I could make out he answered nothing. He stood passive, submissive, with the harsh lines of his lower face set immovably, and his thick-lashed eyes sad above them, while he took the hands held up to him one after another, and shook them wearily, wearily. ”

“ Hughes began to fumble among the papers on the table beside him for his spectacles, and then for the scattered sheets of his manuscript. “Yes, there is a special obligation upon the friends of social reform to a life of common-sense. I have regarded the matter from rather a novel standpoint, and I think you will be interested.”
The old man read on and on. At last Ray heard the latch of the street door click, and the sound of the opening and then the shutting of the door. ”

“ Rather, he was surprised that nothing of the sort happened, to confirm him in his belief that he had been all but in touch with the other life, or to give him some hint, the slightest, the dimmest, why this vision had been shown him, and then instantly broken and withdrawn. In that inmost of his where he recognized its validity, he could not deny that it had a meaning, and that it had been sent him for some good reason special to himself ”

“ Now, you fellows, both sides, go home, and look after your corn and tobacco; and you women, you go and get breakfast for them, and wash up your children and leave the Kingdom of Heaven alone for a while.”
The weight of condemnation was for the Little Flock, but there remained discomfort for the Herd of the Lost. “And you,” the Squire turned to them, “you let these folks worship any stock or stone they're a mind to; and you find out the true God if you can, and stick to Him, and don't bother the idolaters. I reckon He can take care of Himself. ”

“ He tried to pull himself together, and pass things off with an air. But it wasn't altogether a success. Just as he was making as if to take himself off, a friend came rushing up to him. "Hollo, Howarth!" he cried, "you're the very man I wanted to see." I pricked up my ears at this. "Excuse me, sir," I said. "Is this gentleman's name Howarth?" The friend looked me up and down; like those swells do. "Who's this?" he asked. Mr. Smith--or Mr. Howarth--took his arm. "Some person who wishes to make himself offensive to me." ”