Meeker

“ One of his sons (Mr. Meeker's father) lived up among the Short Hills, and was a substantial farmer. A conversation which he had one day with General Dayton, at Elizabethtown, well illustrates the political character of many of the yeomanry of that period. While a portion of the standing army, under the administration of the elder Adams, was at Elizabethtown, Mr. Meeker went to General Dayton to pay his direct tax, in hard cash, for the support of the army. "Of what use is your standing army?" asked Meeker. "To support Congress," replied Dayton. ”

“ Meeker was impatient to get through with the thing. He had lost his pearl; but he did not mean to lose his supper, which was nearly ready, nor to forego the appetizer in the example he was going to make of Oku.
A rope was tied about the diver's waist, held by the negro quarter-master and the mate. His irons were taken off, his knife restored to him.
Oku took the blade and stood poised on the rail like a bronze statue against the sun. The shark had finished the offal and now swam up and down with an expectant eye. He knew that sundown would bring him more garbage. This was his lay. ”

“ Horace Greeley became interested in Mr. Meeker's work and invited him to a place on the editorial staff of "The Tribune," a position which he filled with conspicuous ability for several years; but in common with all idealists, Mr. Meeker was haunted and beset by his visions of a more Utopian future for humanity. A Colorado journal, recently giving some reminiscences of the life of its great citizen, said ”

“ Meeker intensely. She made the preposterous statement that the woman could see through the blank walls of the house. Ena was pale, but pretty, despite dark smudges under her eyes; she sat up very late with boys or else sulked by herself. Albert had a big grinning head on him, and ate flies. Lizzie had often seen him at it. He spent hours against the panes of glass and outside the kitchen door.
It wasn't what you could name gay at the Meekers, and, indeed, it hadn't been necessary for the priest to insist on the girl finding another place ”

“ This Oku and his fellows first suspected, then believed; and it had soured their natures. Their spirits were heavy, and they pined for home. Their pay had been docked and delayed; they had been swindled on the weighing of the shell, shortened in tobacco and other rations. If Oku had taken a pearl, it would, to his reasoning and sense of justice, have merely helped to adjust the balance between him and the skipper.
To Meeker, the brown man and the black was merely a machine of bone and muscle and certain capacities for earning him money. ”

“ And I would like to see my old friend Meeker, amid the surroundings that become him most, and in the impersonations of the old days that the next generation, nor those to come can ever know, for the waste places of the earth are being inhabited, and the old ways are lost ways, and may never be known again. We that were of them know that the world grows better and we do not wish the dial to now reflect only the shadows of the past, but there are times when the old simple ways are ways to regret, even though we accept the truth that progress means betterment. ”

“ CHAPTER V. CROSSING THE MISSOURI.
"What on earth is that?" exclaimed Margaret McAuley, as we approached the ferry landing a few miles below where Omaha now stands.
"It looks for all the world like a great big white flatiron," answered Eliza, the sister, "doesn't it, Mrs. Meeker?" But, leaving the women folks to their similes, we drivers turned our attention more to the teams as we encountered the roads "cut all to pieces" on account of the concentrated travel as we neared the landing and the solid phalanx of wagons that formed the flatiron of white ground. ”

“ Meeker had been granted the angelic vision. The ideal had been revealed, and it was revealed in order that it might be realized in the outer and actual world. He felt the power, the nameless thrill of enchantment that pervades this wonderful country. One who is a poet in heart and soul has said of this Pike's Peak region:—
"Over the range is another world—a happy valley hundreds of miles in extent, fenced in with beauty and joy ”

“ The deeper the water, the more exhausting the work and the smaller the contents of the diver's bag.
The Melanesians were contract laborers. The Tahitians had been wooed to service with many promises, none of which Meeker intended to carry out, many of which he had already welshed on.
The complaints of Oku, backed by Tiri as spokesmen for their crowd, had been met by the threat that they would not be carried back to Papeete but left on Thursday Island. ”

“ Kraemer had died during a sitting. She would be off, she told McGeorge, the first of the week.
The latter, whose interest at the beginning had been commendably penetrating, asked about Mrs. Meeker's sister; but he discovered nothing more than that—Lizzie Tuoey allowed for a heretic—she was religious. They were all serious about the spiritism, and believed absolutely [Pg 204] in Jannie and Stepan, in the messages, the voices and shades that they evoked. ”

“ Nothing could have been more fitting and fortunate than this transcontinental memorial trip by a veteran of the culminating migration, still possessed of the vigor of his prime and an adept in handling the truly symbolic ox- team and prairie schooner. So, single-handed and alone, Ezra Meeker appealed to the historic sense of the American people, to their sense of obligation to the memory of the intrepid Oregon pioneers, as could have been done in no other way. ”

“ Top one, first to port as ye go down—right at the head it is, sir, in some straw."
"Send a man for it, Mr. Harris. Is it in the sheath, you Petrak?"
"Can't say, sir," said Petrak, looking about nervously, and feeling at his belt.
"Can't say! Can't say! You can't say because that's yer knife right there under yer eyes! That's yer knife and you killed this man!"
"Tell the truth, my good man," interjected Meeker, holding up his hands.
"Tell the truth and—"
"Belay!" ”

“ Space and time are nothing to her."
Silence again enveloped him; he might have been thinking of the spiritistic triumphs of Mrs. Meeker or of Ena with her sweet curves. Whatever might be said of the latter, it was clear that she was no prude. McGeorge drew a deep breath; it was the only expression of his immediate preoccupation.
"It was quite a strain," he admitted presently. "I called as often as possible and a little oftener. The reception, except for dear Ena, was not prodigal. Once they were having a sitting, and I went back to the kitchen. ”

“ The last vestige of the old decaying walls were removed and placed overhead, but under the ivy vine, where in the lapse of years the roots of the vine that have taken firm hold of the decaying relics will absorb and transmit not only the memory of the cabin for all time to come, but the very substance of the cabin will be transformed into a new life of everlasting green.
A stone tablet inscribed "Site of Ezra Meeker's Cabin Home," completes the record to be read by the many generations to follow. ”

“ This spirit, though, pervaded the whole camp both with the men and women folks to the end. Thomas McAuley still lives, at Hobart Hills, California, or did a few years ago when I last heard from him, a respected citizen. He has long since passed the eighty-year mark, and has not "laid down" yet.
Did space but permit I would like to tell more in detail of the members of that little happy party (family we called ourselves) camped near the bank of the Platte when the fury of that great epidemic—cholera—burst upon us, but I can only make brief mention. ”

“ Details of incident or of character or of dialogue slip the mind and melt away like smoke into the air. To have seen a play without a theme is the same, a month or two later, as not to have seen a play at all. ”

“ The truth of worthy fiction is evidenced by the honor in which it has been held in all ages among all races. "You can't fool all the people all the time"; and if the drama and the epic and the novel were not true, the human race would have rejected them many centuries ago. Fiction has survived, and flourishes to-day, because it is a means of telling truth. ”

“ I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch the materials; it is the play of thought, and sentiment, and language, the weaving in of characters, lightly yet expressively delineated; the familiar and faithful exhibition of scenes in common life ”

“ Whether or not a play is literature depends not upon the medium of utterance the characters may use, but on whether or not the play sets forth a truthful view of some momentous theme; and whether or not a play is drama depends not upon its trappings and its suits, but on whether or not it sets forth a tense and vital struggle between individual human wills. ”

“ In chasteness and symmetry of general design, in spaciousness fittingly restrained, in simplicity more decorative than deliberate decoration, those white buildings blooming into gold and mirrored in a calm lagoon, dazzled the eye and delighted the aesthetic sense. ”

“ Instead of telling people what they think that they are thinking, he tells them what they have always known but think they have forgotten. He performs, for this oblivious generation, the service of a great reminder. He lures us from the strident and factitious world of which we read daily in the first pages of the newspapers, back to the serene eternal world of little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. ”

“ We learn more about God by watching the annihilation of an individual by Fate; but we learn more about Man by watching the annihilation of an individual by himself. Greek tragedy sends our souls through the invisible; but Elizabethan tragedy answers, "Thou thyself art Heaven and Hell." ”

“ Every novelist of genuine importance seeks not merely to divert but also to instruct—to instruct, not abstractly, like the essayist, but concretely, by presenting to the reader characters and actions which are true. For the best fiction, although it deals with the lives of imaginary people, is no less true than the best history and biography, which record actual facts of human life ”

“ Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of Froom Vale, at a season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should not grow passionate. ”

“ When a dramatist really creates a character, he imagines and projects a human being so truly conceived and so clearly presented that any average man would receive the impression of a living person if he were to read in manuscript the bare lines of the play. But when a playwright merely devises an acting part, he does nothing more than indicate to a capable actor the possibility of so comporting himself upon the stage as to convince his audience of humanity in his performance. ”

“ By the mere fact that we bother to read a novel, thus expending time which might otherwise be passed in company with actual people, we are going out of our way to meet the characters to whom the novelist wishes to introduce us. ”

“ If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us that nothing in life is terminal, nothing is conclusive. Marriage is not an end, as we presume in books; but rather a beginning. Not even death is final. We find our graves not in the ground but in the hearts of our survivors, and our slightest actions vibrate in ever-widening circles through incalculable time. ”

“ Undoubtedly, very few people are always at home for every real experience that knocks upon their doors; very few people, to say the thing more simply, have an experiencing nature. But great fiction may be written only by men of an experiencing nature; and here is a basis for confession that, after all, fiction-writers are born, not made. ”

“ As a consequence, he is familiar with all the tremulous, delicate intimacies of human nature that every woman knows, but that most men glimpse only in moments of exalted sympathy with some wise woman whom they love. His insight has that absoluteness which is beyond the reach of intellect alone. ”

“ In France, instead of calling a man a miser, they call him an Harpagon. We know Rosalind as we know our sweetest summer love; Hamlet is our elder brother, and understands our own wavering and faltering.
Instinctively also we regard the great people of fiction as more real than many of the actual people of a bygone age whose deeds are chronicled in dusty histories. ”

“ The great tragedies have familiar themes,—ambition in Macbeth, jealousy in Othello, filial ingratitude in Lear; there is nothing in these motives that the most unthinking audience could fail to understand. No crowd can resist the fervor of a patriot who goes down scornful before many spears. Show the audience a flag to die for, or a stalking ghost to be avenged, or a shred of honor to maintain against agonizing odds, and it will thrill with an enthusiasm as ancient as the human race. Few are the plays that can succeed without the moving force of love, the most familiar of all emotions. ”

“ A play is a representation, by actors, on a stage, before an audience, of a struggle between individual human wills, motivated by emotion rather than by intellect, and expressed in terms of objective action. ”

“ The reason for this is simply that characters are interesting to a crowd mainly in those crises of emotion that bring them to the grapple. A single individual, like the reader of a novel, may be interested intellectually in those gentle influences beneath which a character unfolds itself as mildly as a blowing rose; but to the gathered multitude a character does not appeal except in moments of contention. ”

“ There is no virtue in reflection unless there be some magic in the mirror. Certain enterprising modern managers permit their press agents to pat them on the back because they have set, say, a locomotive on the stage; but why should we pay two dollars to see a locomotive in the theatre when we may see a dozen locomotives in the Grand Central Station without paying anything? Why, indeed!—unless the dramatist contrives to reveal an imaginable human mystery throbbing in the palpitant heart—no, not of the locomotive, but of the locomotive-engineer. ”