Lone Star

“ Throw your eyes over that great expanse of dark bog, vast as one of the great campagnas you have often described to us, and bethink you how mere loneliness—desolation—needs a stout heart to bear it; how the simple fact that for the long hours of a summer’s day, or the longer hours of a winter’s night, a lone woman has to watch and think of all the possible casualties lives of hardship and misery may impel men to. Do you imagine that she does not mark the growing discontent of the people? ”

“ Through the rainy fragrance of the April night
Slow it falls, circling in the fall,
And all the sheeted lake of sleeping silences
Is troubled by the solitary call.
Each human heart awake knows the loneliness
Of that strange voice clear and far,
That lost voice searching through the midnight,
That lonely star calling to a star.
Old memories are thronging through the darkness...
Slow tears are blinding sleepless eyes... ”

“ The complaint of the great woods, far below their feet, rose about them; the thousand small voices of moving leaf and branch swelling like the murmur of a crowd into one pervading sound. Ellinor felt as if these voices of the earth were claiming her while the astronomer’s ears were deaf.
Whilst they had remained within the observatory she had shared for a moment some of his own exaltation, heard the mysteries speaking to him, felt as if each star that struck her vision was in direct and personal communication with herself. ”

“ And I was thinking, and I coming in through the door, that it’s many a lone woman would be afeard of the like of me in the dark night, in a place wouldn’t be so lonesome as this place, where there aren’t two living souls would see the little light you have shining from the glass. ”

“ Yet there was another and greater loneliness that encompassed him; for however desolate and forsaken a man may feel when he has no single spot on all this vast earth to which his affections can cling, which he can bless when the heart will overflow and yearn for when longing will spread its wings, there is no existence so lonely that he is utterly alone if he can only see the fixed bright star of a life goal shining overhead. But Niels Lyhne had no star. ”

“ Many ways are there in which loneliness may be personified or illustrated: the widow weeping upon the tomb of her only child, a blind man in a crowd, a prostrate figure on some wide spread of midnight moor, over whose vague and distant edge a red eye of moon is glancing under a lid of black cloud. In many ways may loneliness be represented, but there is no expression of it that equals, to my mind, the abandoned ship. Is it because the movement of the sea communicates a fancy of life to the vessel? ”

“ Loneliness garbed in a mantle of merging grey sea and grey sky, trimmed with the spires and turrets of grey and seemingly unsouled ships, whose presence in the blue and gold days was as that of old friends well met, but which now seem to be ragged rents in the solemn dress of Loneliness, reminding one of a derelict’s slovenly covering held together over a hopeless breast by an old gold brooch—perhaps the gift of a mother or handed down from bygone ages. ”

“ This ocean has no past--time has been nought to it; and men have come and gone, leaving behind them no track, no vestige, of their presence. Some French writer, speaking of these prairies, has said that the sense of this utter negation of life, this complete absence of history, has struck him with a loneliness oppressive and sometimes terrible in its intensity. ”

“ The hotel clerk told Lonny that a famous artist from New York had arrived in town that day and was in the hotel. He was on his way westward to New Mexico to study the effect of sunlight upon the ancient walls of the Zuñis. Modern stones reflect light. Those ancient building materials absorb it. The artist wanted this effect in a picture he was painting, and was traveling two thousand miles to get it.
Lonny sought this man out after dinner and told his story. The artist was an unhealthy man, kept alive by genius and indifference to life. ”

“ He thinks that he is still the master of Lone as well as the Duke of Hereward. He thinks that he lives in London, and in the most Objectionable part of London, only to gratify my 'eccentric whim' of being a journalist. And he daily and hourly urges me to return with him to Lone!"
"In the name of Heaven, then gratify him! Take him to Lone as my guest, until you can keep him there as your own. Let him be happy in the illusion that he is still its master. I will see that the servants there, who are most of them his own old people, do not say or do anything to dispel the illusion! ”

“ Sweet with the life of my sunburned days When the sheaves were ripe, and the apples red.
The North Star Whispers to the Blacksmith's Son The North Star whispers: "You are one Of those whose course no chance can change. You blunder, but are not undone, Your spirit-task is fixed and strange. "When here you walk, a bloodless shade, A singer all men else forget. Your chants of hammer, forge and spade Will move the prairie-village yet. "That young, stiff-necked, reviling town Beholds your fancies on her walls, And paints them out or tears them down, Or bars them from her feasting-halls. ”

“ Here, among the limestone rocks, the succulent cactus, and the drought-parched grass of that arid valley, had been born the Boy Artist. Why he came to woo art is beyond postulation. Beyond doubt, some spore of the afflatus must have sprung up within him in spite of the desert soil of San Saba. The tricksy spirit of creation must have incited him to attempted expression and then have sat hilarious among the white-hot sands of the valley, watching its mischievous work. For Lonny’s picture, viewed as a thing of art, was something to have driven away dull care from the bosoms of the critics. ”

“ Lone was henceforth the pride of engineers, the model of architects, the subject of artists, the theme of poets, the Mecca of pilgrims, the eighth wonder of the world.
Lone was opened for the first time a few weeks after its completion, on the occasion of the coming of age of the duke's eldest son and heir, the young Marquis of Arondelle, which fell upon the first of June.
A grand festival was held at Lone, and a great crowd assembled to do honor to the anniversary. A noble and gentle company filled the halls and chambers of the castle, and nearly all the Clan Scott assembled on the grounds. ”

“ His father and Sara were nearly scared stiff, they were so frightened, and wouldn't Mrs. Ware please come and tell them what to do?
It was the beginning of a long siege, for no nurses were to be had in the little settlement, and there were only the neighbors to turn to in times of stress and trouble. What true neighborliness is, in the fullest meaning of the word, can be known only in pioneer places like this. Hands already full of burdens stretched out to help lighten theirs, and [136] for awhile one common interest and anxiety made the families of Lone-Rock as one. ”

“ I'll go out and git Roney now.”
At one o'clock in the morning the lone agent at Manipa was aroused from sleep by the Loner, who carried in his cramped arms, as if it were an injured child, a half-conscious dog, while slung over his shoulder was a burnished rifle.
“Wh—wh—what the hell's this?” the sleepy agent demanded, opening his eyes and staring at the white-bearded old man who peered at him appealingly.
“It's me—John Barton. Sioux's been hurt bad. Shot! You can stop trains, cain't you? They'll stop if you ask 'em with that red light of your'n, wont they?” ”

“ But worst of all was the awful loneliness from which I suffered. It seemed to me as though there were no other living thing in all the Universe and never had been and never would be any other living thing. I felt as though I were the Universe rushing solitary through space for ages upon ages in a frantic search for fellowship, and finding none. ”

“ Around them endlessly lay the sea, swept by unknown winds, cursed by the winter’s cold, like death itself in its infinity and its haunting fear. The life they had left behind was already shadowed and dim: the farewell shouts, the laughter, the gaiety, the teeming crowds that moved and were never still were all like something imagined, unspeakably far off. Only the sea and the sky were left, and the craft struggling wearily, ever farther into the empty North.
Lenore found herself oppressed by an unreasoning fear. Realities were getting home to her, and she was afraid of them. ”

“ Loneliness, everlasting loneliness! Loneliness within herself: that feeling of which Jules had such a dread! Withdrawn from the world which had no charm for her, sinking away alone into emptiness! She was thirty, she was old, an old woman. Her house would be empty, her heart empty! Dreams, clouds of dreaming, which fly away, which lift like smoke, revealing only emptiness. Emptiness, emptiness, emptiness! ”

“ My dear lady, it is the same wicked old story as we hear over and over again, and a many times too often. Well, the young man—a certain person, I mean—while at his shooting-box, foot of Ben Lone, happened to see this handsome lass, and fell in love with her at first sight, as certain persons sometimes do with young peasant girls as they oughtn't to marry. ”

“ Nothing was wanting to the simplicity of her quiet assent. “A very lone woman.” Her face, for a moment, had the vision of a long distance. “My loneliness is great enough to want something big to hold it—and my taste good enough to want something beautiful. You see, I had your picture.”
Yule’s innocence made a movement. ”

“ And his loneliness in that temple attic under the stars, his loneliness, too, had a meaning I did not fail to understand later, and why he was always available for me and seemed to belong to no other.
"To every one who finds me," he said, with the strange smile that wrapped his whole being and not his face alone, "to every one I am the same, and yet different. I am not really ever alone. The whole world, nay"—his voice rose to a singing cry—"the whole universe lies in this room, or just beyond that window-pane; for here past and future meet and all real dreams find completeness. ”

“ My eyes will always turn back with loneliness and longing for the old faces and old scenes that I loved more than my life. But though it tears my heart out of my body to go on, I must go on.
There’s no going back to the Old World for anyone who has breathed the invigorating air of America. I return to America with the new realization that in no other country would a nobody from nowhere—one of the millions of lonely immigrants that pour through Ellis Island—a dumb thing with nothing but hunger and desire, get the chance to become articulate that America has given me. ”

“ She comes from a good family, and has had a good education; he is ignorant and stupid, but he seems to appreciate her adoration. I had a ticket for “Lohengrin” this evening, but I am not inclined to go.
After all, I can understand it. Once I should have thought it silly, but my ideas have undergone a change. When I reflect on it there is really only one condition that can be called unhappy, and that is loneliness. Loneliness on a desert island, loneliness in a great city, loneliness in married life.... Loneliness.
[136]
For this reason all living beings crowd together. ”

“ Ruth was coming under the oaks. She liked the cool shade and hated the glare. She was nineteen, with a woman’s form and her mother’s eyes—proud, sweet, aloof.
“Desert man, I am lonesome,” she said. “My grandfather has gone again. He is chasing some new will-o’-the-wisp. Gold and mines, cattle and land—and now it’s water. He has an ear for every man.”
“Lonesome? You! What do you know of loneliness?” asked Adam.
“There’s a loneliness of soul.”
“Ah! but you are young. Go help Genie plan her home.”
“Genie and Gene! Two people with but one voice! They cannot hear or see anyone but themselves. ”

“ Images and observations which could easily be disposed of by a glance, a smile, an exchange of opinion, will occupy him unbearably, sink deep into the silence, become full of meaning, become life, adventure, emotion. Loneliness ripens the eccentric, the daringly and estrangingly beautiful, the poetic. But loneliness also ripens the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the illicit.—So, the things he had met with on the trip, the ugly old fop with his twaddle about sweethearts, the lawbreaking gondolier who was cheated of his pay, still left the traveller uneasy. ”

“ Most people living in Southern Europe have an instinct for shutting out the sun, even the delightful sun of a southern winter day. Still, to Lily's English eyes the drawn blinds and closed shutters gave a deserted, eerie, unlived-in look to La Solitude.
As they all three stood there, M. Popeau and the driver having put down the luggage for a moment on the hard, dry grass, the first sign of life at La Solitude suddenly appeared in the person of a huge black and white cat. ”

“ The gulf of loneliness into which I fell on the night of Marjorie's marriage was but the shallow waters of an ocean of despair in which I floundered through the dreary days that followed. I now had occasion to realize that loneliness is not a matter of space or distances, of the many or of the few, but a matter of one's adjustment toward his surroundings. In all the months of my life on Fourteen the devils of loneliness had never wormed into my vitals ”

“ There is no sense of loneliness anywhere, but rather a host of teeming lives on every hand, palpable though hidden, remote from us though touching our lives, calling to us through the gloom with wordless voices, inviting us to enter and share with them the mystical life of this miraculous earth, great mother of us all, The dark is full of watching eyes. ”

“ A walk as lonely as the voyage of the human soul is lonely from birth to death with nothing to guide it but the flickering glow from its own frail spirit lighted it knows not where....
And, so tired that he could hardly move his legs, but free at last of that awful feeling in his head—free for the first time for days and days—Lennan came out of the Park at the gate where he had gone in, and walked towards his home, certain that tonight, one way or the other, it would be decided.... ”