M.P.

“ Of the Lords and Commons of this here nation.
There they are—all cut out in cork—
The "Collective Wisdom" wondrous to see;
My eyes! when all them heads are at work,
What a vastly weighty consarn it must be.
As for the "wisdom,"—that may come anon;
Tho', to say truth, we sometimes see
(And I find the phenomenon no uncommon 'un)
A man who's M.P. with a head that's M.T.
Our Lords are rather too small, 'tis true ”

“ I had at my girdle the little cangiar, with silver handle encrusted with coral, and curved blade six inches long, damascened in gold, and sharp as a razor; the blackest and the basest of all the devils of the Pit was whispering in my breast with calm persistence: 'Kill, kill—and eat.'
Why I should have killed her I do not know. That question I now ask myself. It must be true, true that it is 'not good' for man to be alone. ”

“ These proud Turks died stolidly, many of them. In streets of Kassim-pacha, in crowded Taxim on the heights of Pera, and under the long Moorish arcades of Sultan-Selim, I have seen the open-air barber's razor with his bones, and with him the half-shaved skull of the faithful, and the long two-hours' narghile with traces of burnt tembaki and haschish still in the bowl. Ashes now are they all, and dry yellow bone; but in the houses of Phanar and noisy old Galata, and in the Jew quarter of Pri-pacha, the black shoe and head-dress of the Greek is still distinguishable from the Hebrew blue. ”

“ Hogarth's back was toward him, the iron leg lying near a box in which was a sitting hen, on its top a candlestick, the calico bag, and a lot of the gems: at which the priest's palm covered his awed mouth, and with a fleet thievishness, like a cat on hot bricks, he trotted back to the cottage.
Ten minutes later Hogarth entered, nodding: “Ah, O'Hara...”; and he called down: “Mrs. Sturgess! pen, ink, and paper!”
When these came, he sat and wrote:
“I have escaped from prison, and come into great power. I summon you to meet me at the elm in the beech-wood to-night at nine. ”

“ At the same time that we see the necessity of creating the common will and giving voice to it, we must bear in mind that there should be no crystallizing process by which any particular expression of the common will should be taken as eternally right because it is the expression of the common will. It is right for to-day but not for to-morrow. The flaming fact is our daily life, whatever it is, leaping forever and ever out of the common will. Democracy is the ever-increasing volume of power pouring through men and shaping itself as the moment demands. ”

“ Here they meet once a year--the stern, ancient city, represented by its sturdy citizens, its fair women, its proud inhabitants, and Holland's youthful Queen, blossoming forth as a symbol of new, fresh life, fresh hope and promise. Here they meet, the sons and daughters of the men and women who never gave way, who saw their immense riches accrue, as their liberties grew, by sheer force of will, by inflexible determination, by dauntless power of purpose ”

“ I will rage like the Caesars, and be a withering blight where I pass like Sennacherib, and wallow in soft delights like Sardanapalus. I will build me a palace, vast as a city, in which to strut and parade my Monarchy before the Heavens, with stones of pure molten gold, and rough frontispiece of diamond, and cupola of amethyst, and pillars of pearl. For there were many men to the eye: but there was One only, really: and I was he. And always I knew it:—some faintest secret whisper which whispered me: "You are the Arch-one, the motif of the world, Adam, and the rest of men not much." ”

“ All the accumulated effect of these is seen in our habits of thinking, our modes of living. But we cannot rest in the common. The surge of life sweeps through the given similarity, the common ground, and breaks it up into a thousand differences. This tumultuous, irresistible flow of life is our existence: the unity, the common, is but for an instant, it flows on to new differings which adjust themselves anew in fuller, more varied, richer synthesis. The moment when similarity achieves itself as a composite of working, seething forces, it throws out its myriad new differings. ”

“ I speak not only of the virtues that are in some sort the essence of the profession made by their united representative types,—Pity, Wisdom, Prudence, Moderation, Eloquence, Erudition, and like attributes,—I speak of other virtues, the characteristic qualities of another and separate order, like those composing the perfections of a chief of war ... ”

“ And there are wines, and opiums, and haschish; and there are oils, and spices, fruits and bivalves, and soft-breathing Cyclades, and scarlet luxurious Orients. I will be restless and turbulent in my territories: and again, I will be languishing and fond. I will say to my soul: "Be Full."'
I watch my mind, as in the old days I would watch a new precipitate in a test-tube, to see into what sediment it would settle. ”

“ The chalice predicts indeed that I and my house shall end when the stone is lost—a mere fiction at first, an idler's dream then, but now—now—that the prophecy has stood so long a part of the reality of things, and a fact among facts—no longer fiction, but Adamant, stern as the very word of God. Do I not feel hourly since it has gone how the surges of life ebb, ebb ever lower in my heart? ”

“ When I found a little fjord, I went up it to the end where stood a stretch of basalt columns, looking like a shattered temple of Antediluvians; and when my foot at last touched land, I sat down there a long, long time in the rubbly snow, and silently wept. My eyes that night were like a fountain of tears. For the firm land is health and sanity, and dear to the life of man; but I say that the great ungenial ice is a nightmare, and a blasphemy, and a madness, and the realm of the Power of Darkness. ”

“ How do you dare to say now that Miss Langler's frailty is any fault of mine, when it is wholly your own? I was devoting myself to the welfare of men, seeing clearly, knowing clearly, what I did, for as the heavens are high above the earth, just so, I suppose, are my thoughts larger than your thoughts, and you dared to meddle with me. I ought to see you shot now like two dogs, I assure you. Why should I take my useful life down into the darkness of death in order to save pedants like you, or to spare a woman's feelings? ”

“ Whether they be in a cathedral or college library, in a bookshop or the most modern of cases, it is all one to your true collector. It is the books and the books only about which he cares. No sooner does he feel the ancient tome within his hands than his soul is borne rapidly away upon the wings of fancy, far far back into the dim ages, high above all worldly considerations; caring, understanding, feeling, in tune with the magic so wondrously locked up in this ancient volume, to which his love of books alone has provided the key. ”

“ One only of the sledges, half buried, I saw near the spot of our bivouac.
Alone that same day I began my way southward, and for five days made good progress. On the eighth day I noticed, stretched right across the south-eastern horizon, a region of purple vapour which luridly obscured the face of the sun: and day after day I saw it steadily brooding there. But what it could be I did not understand.
Well, onward through the desert ice I continued my lonely way, with a baleful shrinking terror in my heart; for very stupendous, alas! is the burden of that Arctic solitude upon one poor human soul. ”

“ The Master said, 'The wise are free from perplexities; the virtuous from anxiety; and the bold from fear.' CHAP. XXIX. The Master said, 'There are some with whom we may study in common, but we shall find them unable to go along
with us to principles. ”

“ It is my belief that within fifty years from now the huge forces of the earth will be let fully loose to tumble as they will; and this planet will become one of the undisputed playgrounds of Hell, and the theatre of commotions stupendous as those witnessed on the face of Saturn.
The Earth is all on my brain, on my brain, O dark-minded Mother, with thy passionate cravings after the Infinite, thy regrets, and mighty griefs, and comatose sleeps, and sinister coming doom, O Earth: and I, poor man, though a king, sole witness of thy bleak tremendous woes. ”

“ And can it be fated that the most advanced civilisation of the future shall needs have in it, as the first and chief element of its glory, the most barbarous of all the rituals of barbarism—the immolation of hecatombs which wail a muling human wail? Is it indeed part of man's strange destiny through the deeps of Time that he one day bow his back to the duty of pruning himself as a garden, so that he run not to a waste wilderness? ”

“ In an outer room sat O'Hara, writing, reading Theocritus, or a little book on mediaeval embroidery, forefinger on cheek; and anon, absolutely without motive, he would rise, creep, and peep through a keyhole at Hogarth, then on stalking, bowing tiptoe, grinning a rancid grimace of stealth, get back to his seat, and read—the tutor falling over head and ears in love with his pupil: one of those passions that end tragically. ”

“ And through such a roll of generations, Arthur! The beauty that could so long baffle the law 'they all shall change,' what a charm of life must have informed her! If we who now see her mouthing her mumblings in her extreme age, garishly rouged and dizened with trumperies, can still by an effort live again in her youth, how vital a youth must that have been! ”

“ It is no wonder that he is impressed, for the soul of the true book-collector is ever in communion with the manes of those who gave birth to his books. He is brother to author, paper-maker, compositor, publisher, and binder, understanding all their hopes, doubts, and fears, in sympathy with all the thoughts that gave his volumes their shape, size, and appearance. Have you not often realised, brother collector, the spirit that is hidden in every old book, the concentrated thoughts that have been materialised in giving it birth? Surely thoughts never die. ”

“ As you see, it must be either you or I to whom this bedstead within one hour will turn out to be the death-bed. Death is dark and monstrous, yes, death is dark. The artful old brain all at once ceases to discern, the old heart no longer brawls, all becomes nothing. But some humour of the soul has brought me to risk it, and, even if I should not manage to get through, what, after all, is the death of a man? ”

“ This did not happen till the 3rd August, nearly four months from the Pole.
I can't think, my God, that any heart of man ever tholed the appalling nightmare and black abysm of sensations in which, during those four long desert months, I weltered: for though I was as a brute, I had a man's heart to feel. What I had seen, or dreamed, at the Pole followed and followed me; and if I shut my poor weary eyes to sleep, those others yonder seemed to watch me still with their distraught and gloomy gaze, and in my spinning dark dreams spun that eternal ecstasy of the lake. ”

“ I mounted by broken marble steps to the corridors running round the open space, and thence pursued my way through a mazeland of apartments—suite upon suite—along many a length of passage, up and down many stairs. Dust-clouds rose from the uncarpeted floors and choked me; incontinent Echo coughed answering ricochets to my footsteps in the gathering darkness, and added emphasis to the funereal gloom of the dwelling. Nowhere was there a vestige of furniture—nowhere a trace of human life. ”

“ Hogarth's first thought, as getting-up bell clattered réveille through the gallery, was of Loveday's cypher, and by the time the warder came to ask if he would see governor or doctor, a thought of Monsignor O'Hara had somehow mixed itself with the thought of the cypher; when an orderly handed in the day's brown loaf, he was thinking, “Strange that he never told me what he has done”; eating his pint of gruel, he thought: “If I will not escape myself, I might perhaps let another.” ”

“ So, at any rate, was Harris introduced to Adair Street, became its chief minister, and ten days before the second-reading debate had won, by O'Hara's recommendation, an entrée into the Palace as servant to a gentleman-usher-daily-waiter: and now he made bright the knife of the assassin, tending its edge as a gardener the tender sprout, the knife being his métier and forte, he despising the noisy, mediate, uncertain pistol, nor could use it, his instincts belonging to the Stone Age. But the days passed, and he could by no means get near to Hogarth. ”

“ All that northern shore of the Arabian Sea has at the present time an odour which it wafts far over the water, resembling odours of happy vague dream-lands, sweet to smell in the early mornings as if the earth were nothing but a perfume, and life an inhalation. ”

“ Yonder, to the north-west, appeared a ghost, a thing, a derelict brig, driving downhill on the billows, like a blind man gadding aimless with a crazy down-look, the rags of her one sail drumming on the gusts; and near, nearer, within a stone's-throw of the Boodah, she swaggered wearily, drab Arab, doomed despondent Ahasuerus of the deep, nomad on the nomad sea; and on into the gloom of the south-west she roamed, to be again and again re-created by the rolling light-drum, while Hogarth with a groan said: “If I were only dead! I feel to-night like a man abandoned by the Almighty”. ”

“ And his wife Rebecca, mother of many sons, prying from a window-lattice, writhed odd the eyebrows of the cynic, one beyond the other: for not with foot alone he danced, but his wrung belly laboured in that travail of Orient dancing; and she turned and smiled to Margaret Loveday a turned-down smile, implying shrug, implying girding, her eyelids lowered, yet indulgent of his nature's rage.
And not with foot and abdomen alone he danced, but his two balancing palms danced to the beat of the heat of the music's heart; and with heel and toe he danced. ”