James Keely

“ While Keely was hampered by mere tradesmen, who only looked to the immediate recoupment of their outlay, men more anxious for dividends than discoveries, he could do little save turn showman, and exhibit his partial control of the harmonies of nature as springs catch woodcocks, and was forced to open his crude contrivances to divert the eternal will of the cosmos to work-a-day uses, that he might coax from the greed and credulity of mere mammon-worshippers the sorely grudged means to continue his exploration of the infinite. ”

“ He was one of the persons denounced in Keeling’s narrative, and was accused of having conspired to assassinate the royal brothers in their road to Newmarket, an accusation belied by the whole tenor of his life and conduct, and which, if it had been true, would have proved him, who was never thought a weak or foolish man, to be as destitute of common sense as of honour and probity. ”

“ At this time a number of the leading journals in various parts of the United States announced that, although Keely’s methods and his failures had combined to engender distrust and arouse ridicule, it could no longer be denied that he had discovered what no other man has discovered. ”

“ Surely something is radically wrong. The scientists owe it to themselves as well as to the inventor to see to it that this condition is not allowed to continue. They should appoint a commission to investigate, and find out whether Keely is a genius worthy of the highest honours and rewards that can be bestowed, an arrant impostor, whose fittest place would be the penitentiary, or a crank that ought to be put in a lunatic asylum. ”

“ He could afford the time, he was so well up—when Spencer Coyle remembered how well up he was he could have boxed his ears. The tall, athletic young man was not physically a subject for simplified reasoning; but there was a troubled gentleness in his handsome face, the index of compunction mixed with pertinacity, which signified that if it could have done any good he would have turned both cheeks. He evidently didn't pretend that his wisdom was superior; he only presented it as his own. It was his own career, after all, that was in question. ”

“ As a suggestion to those interested in psychological researches I will mention that Keely has copied nature in all his instruments from the Vibrophone, which is fashioned after the human ear, up to the Disintegrator, in which the neutral centre represents the human heart. With the system which Keely is unfolding to us we may well say, with Buckle, “A vast and splendid career lies before us, which it will take many ages to complete. As we surpass our fathers, so will our children surpass us. ”

“ When men of more extended research have been on the eve of investigating for themselves they have, until 1889, been deterred from doing so by the representations made to them that Keely was “using compressed air to humbug his audiences.” ”

“ Keele imagines a place is good, the steamer stops and we all gather fossils. When lame James, the steward, our erstwhile jig-expert, is about to serve coffee, he pokes his head over the side and orders the engines stopped that we may drink the beverage without spillage. The beardless prospector buys tinned peaches from the commissariat, opens them with a jack-knife and passes them round the deck with impartiality and a to-hell-with-the-man-that-works smile. ”

“ He is a man of very good sense, and of an excellent understanding.’ Keightley seems to have stayed in London throughout James II's reign, but Clarendon's efforts to induce the king to give his brother-in-law a high place in the Irish government failed. When James II fled from Whitehall at the approach of William of Orange (December 1688) , Keightley was sent by Clarendon to the fugitive king at Rochester to entreat him to stay in England. James II saw Keightley on the night of 22 Dec., but left for France early the next morning. After the revolution Keightley returned to Ireland. ”

“ Spencer Coyle, however, paid the penalty of his own profundity in feeling more and more worried; he could so easily see that there were all sorts of things in his young friend that the people of Paramore wouldn't understand. He began even already to react against the notion of his being harassed—to reflect that, after all, he had a right to his ideas—to remember that he was of a substance too fine to be in fairness roughly used. ”

“ The young man gave Mr. Coyle a more perceptive glance. "I'm sure he wouldn't do anything dishonorable."
"Well—it won't look right. He must be made to feel that—work it up. Give him a comrade's point of view—that of a brother-in-arms."
"That's what I thought we were going to be!" young Lechmere mused, romantically, much uplifted by the nature of the mission imposed on him. "He's an awfully good sort."
"No one will think so if he backs out!" said Spencer Coyle.
"They mustn't say it to me!" his pupil rejoined, with a flush. ”

“ Keely’s labours can alone secure to him freedom to pursue researches on his own road; a course pronounced by Professor Leidy, Professor Hertz, and Professor Fitzgerald, to be “the only proper line for him to pursue.”
The building of an engine is not in Mr. ”

“ It surprises me that the human heart is capable of containing and bearing so much misery. Was I born for this end? God bless her, and 501 her mother, and my sister, and George, and his wife, and you, and all!
During the four days they remained at Naples Keats received a second invitation in the kindest possible terms from Shelley to come and settle near him in Pisa, but determined to carry out his original plan of wintering at Rome, where he was to place Taylor’s bill to his credit at Torlonia’s and whither he carried a special introduction to Dr (afterwards Sir James) Clark. ”

“ Keely is giving birth to a system. Both are exceedingly imperfect in the expression of their views; yet in points of detail each possesses a firm dialectical grip. In their writings both seem overwhelmed by the vast extent of the realm they are exploring. Both find in harmony the object and the ending of the world’s development. Conflicting with modern science at very many points, visionary as both appear to be, powerful expression is given to an idea of life both in the macrocosm and the microcosm, the validity of which can be questioned only by materialism. ”

“ Coyle looked at his watch.
"You may smoke one cigarette."
He felt a hand on his shoulder, and he turned round to see his wife tilting candlegrease upon his coat. The ladies were going to bed, and it was Sir Philip's inveterate hour; but Mrs. Coyle confided to her husband that after the dreadful things he had told her she positively declined to be left alone, for no matter how short an interval, in any part of the house. He promised to follow her within three minutes, and after the orthodox hand-shakes the ladies rustled away. ”

“ We can apprehend what we cannot comprehend.’ If Keely should die, I fear no one could understand his writings. Every day we read of distinguished men dying. The other day a man carried with him into the grave his secret for the cheap production of aluminium. No one man entrusted by Providence with high interests has a right to allow a possibility of their sinking back, perhaps for ages, into the void of the unknown. ”

“ Coyle became so nervous about their persecuted young friend, and so possessed by the fear that that wicked girl had availed herself of his invitation to put him to an abominable test, that she begged her husband to go and look into the matter, at whatever cost to his own equilibrium. ”

“ This temptation, however, said nothing to Spencer Coyle, for whom, as a strong character revealing itself in color and sound, she was as a spectacle, and who was glad to regard her as a force exerted on his own side. He wished her nephew had more of her narrowness instead of being almost cursed with the tendency to look at things in their relations. He wondered why, when she came up to town, she always resorted to Baker Street for lodgings. He had never known nor heard of Baker Street as a residence—he associated it only with bazaars and photographers. ”

“ It was in this year, 1888, that a woman, interested in all branches of science, who had proved to her own satisfaction the value to humanity, as well as to science, of Keely’s discoveries, was deprived of legal and maternal rights on account of the delusions that she was very generally believed to be under. ”

“ A letter from John Keats to his brother George, under date of September 21st, 1819, contains the following words: “Our bodies, every seven years, are completely fresh-materialed: seven years ago it was not this hand that clenched itself against Hammond.” Another version of the same letter (the true wording of which is matter of some dispute) substitutes: “Mine is not the same hand I clenched at Hammond’s.” Mr. Buxton Forman, who gives the former phrase as the genuine one, thinks that “this phrase points to a serious rupture as the cause of his quitting his apprenticeship to Hammond.” ”

“ Keely is dealing with lies so close to the spiritual realm of things, and brings us so near to the point at which the Almighty is in immediate touch of His Creation in His unceasing upholding of it, that all Christian men might be expected to take a deep interest in researches which promise so much. ”

“ We trust Keely will continue to bombard his corpuscles until he accomplishes it. And when he does, all other scientific men of this or any other age will sink by comparison into insignificance. Let no man say he cannot do it. ”

“ But in his labours Keely finds a recompense that, as yet, [287] “the world knows not of;” for day by day he sees the once, to him, obscure domain lit up with ever-increasing glory; a domain the boundaries of which are the boundaries of the universe: the entrance into which promises the fulfilment of the hopes of those who look forward to “a time when we shall no longer go to the blind to lead the blind in our search to make life worth living ”

“ Keeley's brother, who could hardly conceal his amusement, but, to reassure her, displayed the cart and mules by which I had come. If in England we had heard of the arrival of a "unicorn" in an aeroplane, we should not have shown more anxiety or taken more trouble to hear about the strange creature than did they concerning myself. Their curiosity did not end here. What was Mr. Keeley doing in Mafeking? Was he fighting for the English? How many head of cattle had they on the farm? ”

“ The Keats brothers as they grew up were remarked for their intense fraternal feeling and strong vein of family pride. But it was a pride that looked forward and not back: they were bent on raising the family name and credit, but seem to have taken no interest at all in its history, and have left no record or tradition concerning their forbears. Some of their friends believed their father to have been a Devonshire man: their sister, who long survived them, said she remembered hearing as a child that he came from Cornwall, near the Land’s End. ”

“ Contrary winds held them beating about the Channel, and ten days after starting they had got no farther than Portsmouth, where Keats landed for a day, and paid a visit to his friends at Bedhampton. On board ship in the Solent immediately afterwards he wrote to Brown a letter confiding to him the secret of his torments more fully than he had ever confided it face to face. Even if his body would recover of itself, his passion, he says would prevent it. “The very thing which I want to live most for will be a great occasion of my death. ”

“ You must soon bring all your present troubles to a close, and so must I, but we must, like the Fox, prepare for a fresh swarm of flies. Banish money—Banish sofas—Banish Wine—Banish Music; but right Jack Health, honest Jack Health, true Jack Health—Banish Health and banish all the world.
On the 14th of April Keats took the night mail for Southampton, whence he writes next day a lively letter to his brothers. By the 17th, having looked at Shanklin and decided against it, he was installed in a lodging at Carisbrooke. ”

“ Keely may prove, AS FROM LATE DEVELOPMENTS HE IS LIKE TO DO, that the hidden spirit of the Cosmos, which men call Deity, First Cause, Nature, and other sonorous but indefinite names, has manifested itself to him; that the music of the spheres is a truth, not an imagination, and that vibration, which is sight, hearing, taste and smell, is in serious verity, all else. ”

“ Pride and social sensitiveness apart, we can imagine that a full understanding was not easy between them, and that Keats, with his strong vein of every-day humanity, sense, and humour, and his innate openness of mind, may well have been as much repelled as attracted by the unearthly ways and accents of Shelley, his passionate negation of the world’s creeds and the world’s law, and his intense proselytizing ardour. ”

“ Since the days of Leucippus, poets and philosophers have often touched upon the mysteries hidden in sound, which are now being revealed in the experimental researches of Keely. These truths make no impression on those who are not gifted with any comprehension of nature’s harmonious workings, and are regarded as flights of fancy and of rhetoric. ”

“ KEELEY, MARY ANNE (1806–1899) , English actress, was born at Ipswich on the 22nd of November 1805 or 1806. Her maiden name was Goward, her father being a brazier and tinman. After some experience in the provinces, she first appeared on the stage in London on the 2nd of July 1825, in the opera Rosina. It was not long before she gave up “singing parts” in favour of the drama proper, where her powers of character-acting could have scope. ”