Urnings

“ The lifeless, soundless waste of rock, where only thin winds whistle out of silence and fade suddenly into still air, is passed. Then comes the descent, with its forests of larch and cembra, golden and dark green upon a ground of grey, and in front the serried shafts of the Bernina, and here and there a glimpse of emerald lake at turnings of the road. Autumn is the season for this landscape. Through the fading of innumerable leaflets, the yellowing of larches, and something vaporous in the low sun, it gains a colour not unlike that of the lands we seek. ”

“ And to add to the charm, Arnold has filled the landscape with humanity and its work, with shepherd and reaper, gipsies and scholars, hunters and oarsmen, dancing maidens and wandering youths, among whom, alive and gay, Thyrsis and the Scholar Gipsy, and a meditative Arnold, alive and serious, move and speak of the true aims, the just ideas, the grave conduct, of human life. The picture is delightful, and the urging power of it is love—the life-long love of an Oxford scholar for the shelter and inspiration of his youth. ”

“ The force of habit is too strong in you, Bunny. I shall shut the window and leave everything exactly as we found it. Lord Ernest will probably tumble before he is badly missed; and then he may come back to put salt on us ”

“ The little tailor now demanded the promised reward from the King, but he repented his promise, and pondered once more how he could rid himself of the hero. ‘Before you obtain the hand of my daughter and half my kingdom,’ he said to him, ‘you must do another deed of valour. A unicorn is running about loose in the wood, and doing much mischief; you must first catch it.’ ‘I’m even less afraid of one unicorn than of two giants; seven at a blow, that’s my motto.’ He took a piece of cord and an axe with him, went out to the wood, and again told the men who had been sent with him to remain outside. ”

“ For the first time this view of nature enters into English poetry with Arnold. He sees the loveliness of her doings, but he also sees their terror and dreadfulness and their relentlessness. But what in his poetry he chiefly sees is the peace of nature's obedience to law, and the everlasting youth of her unchanging life. ”

“ And yet, on the further side of those broad ridges and rises were scores of villages—a little world of country life, lying unseen under our eyes.
“A good deal like looking at humanity,” he said: “there is such a thing as getting so far above our fellow-men that we see only one side of them.”
Ah, how much better was this sort of talk than the chatter and gossip of the Tabb and the Hoogencamp—than the Major’s dissertations upon his everlasting circulars! My wife and I exchanged glances.
“Now, when I went up the Matterhorn,” Mr. Brede began. ”

“ The number of them, often from thirty to seventy, probably results from the circumstance of many poor persons having by degrees deposited their urns in the barrows of the rich. Since cinerary urns are not unfrequently dug up both in open fields and in beds of peat, the poorer classes have probably been obliged to select this simple mode of interment because they had no opportunity of placing the ashes of their relatives in a barrow. ”

“ Arnold had seemed to be unusually bright and full of fun. At about nine o’clock, he had gone into the library to write to the boys; and he had been away from the room for more than two hours, before they wondered at his absence. Then Mrs. Arnold went in to speak to him, only to find that he had left them, never to come back to his pleasant earthly home. He sat there, leaning back in his chair, as one fallen asleep, with a quiet smile on his genial face which had so rarely known a frown. ”

“ Alas! the times are evil for him who would seek an honest fame, and aim at the practice of virtue. Let those about to enter into official life digest these words, and benefit to the State may be the result.
THE UNICORN. [25]
That the unicorn is a spiritual being is beyond all doubt. Hymned in the Odes, immortalised in Springs and Autumns, [26] it has found a place in the writings of all ages. Women and children alike know that it is a portent of good.
Yet it is reared in no farmyard: it is rarely ever seen throughout the empire's breadth. It is classed under no species. ”

“ I belong, as I have said, to the prosaic class of mankind. We ought to catch at least something of Arnold's spirit, so far as to admit, at least, that the great problem is to reconcile unflinching loyalty to truth with tenderness 'infinite,' if possible, for the errors which are but a grasping after truth. If Arnold combined the two tendencies in a fashion of his own, he set a most valuable example, even to those who cannot think his method successful. ”

“ When I was leaving I said to Munnings, "What about those sable brushes, Munnings?" He replied: "Don't you remember I asked you three questions?" "I do remember your asking me something," said I. "Well," said he, "the first question I asked was, 'Have you got a car?'" "What the hell has that got to do with my sable brushes?" said I. "A great lot," said he. "You can damn well drive to Paris and get some more for yourself. ”

“ Like most of the men who took part in the early conflicts with the English, Urien became a hero of British tradition, and so shadowy is the part he and his family play in the mediæval poems and romances that Professor Rhys inclines to the view that the historical ‘Urbigena’ and a mythological ‘Urogenos’ have united to furnish the traits of the later ‘Urien’ (Arthurian Legend, pp. 242–3) . ”

“ Since boldness is often the truest kind of caution, it was in my mind that I should snatch my chance to pass the sentry and so slip through the gap in the fence to join Arnold in the garden, trusting to my wit to frame a plausible excuse for the intrusion. Though for honor’s sake I had turned my back on the purpose of betraying our chief deserter, I meant to delay my own escape long enough to make sure that Champe was safely out of the way. ”

“ Behind Christoffer Urne’s garden ran a passage just wide enough for a man to squeeze through. This was the way Ulrik Frederik had to take when he visited his mistress, and he would usually have Hop-o’-my-Thumb mounted on guard at the end of the passage, lest people in the street should see him climbing the board fence. ”

“ Where fair-ones frequented their praise to yield—
To him who won the honors of the field—
There Arnold found himself, and bore away
Full oft the prizes of the gamesome day.
But he, withal those pleasures at command,
Could not forget the home of Hollybrand;
And nightly visions oft recall’d the spot;
As oft, in dreams, he saw the little cot,
Wherein he trusted there did still remain
Whom he would call (and hoped) his “virgin Jane.” XVI.
It happen’d now, when fifteen years had flown,
That Arnold’s parents, both were—dead and gone! ”

“ We are different from her; we move on in a straight line, he might have said, Nature goes round and round. "We begin," he did say, "where Nature ends"; and he recurs elsewhere to the same thought.
These are some of the cries of his first poems, when he was but twenty-seven, It is plain, then, that the racking trouble of man's disobedience to law, his necessary restlessness, and the confused noise that attended it—in contrast with Nature's obedience, tranquillity, and steady toil—were heavily pressed on Arnold by the circumstances of his time. ”

“ For that is the hardship of life, that it’s ever a flux and change. We are here to-day and away to-morrow, and the bigger the company and the more high-hearted the merriment, the less likely is the experience to be repeated. I’m sitting here in a miraculous dwelling in the land of Lorn, and I have but to shut my eyes and round about me are cavaliers of fortune at the board. I give you the old word, Elrigmore: ‘Claymore and the Gael ‘; for the rest—pardon me—you gentlemen are out of the ploy. ”

“ After I had the pleasure and honor of making Baron Bunsen's acquaintance, I was one day talking with him about Arnold, and the immense loss I considered his death to England, when he answered, almost in Mrs. E——'s words, but still more emphatically, that he would work better even dead than alive, that there was in him a powerful element of antagonism which roused antagonism in others: his individuality, he said, stood sometimes in the way of his purpose, he darkened his own light; "he will be more powerful now that he is gone than even while he was here." ”

“ We were facing this last resort in silence, with the misshapen candle guttering down to its final two inches, when the suspense ended in the crash of a rudely opened door in the room overhead, the trampling of many feet and a hoarse murmur of voices. Our devil of a boat-builder had returned, bringing other devils with him. I held my watch to the flickering light.
“Ten o’clock, Sergeant; and we have only two hours before midnight,” said I. “How long will it take us to pull the boat you speak of around to Arnold’s garden, if so be we are lucky enough to have a chance to man the oars?” ”

“ Indeed, these two regions, the beauty of the common world and the great stories, were the homes where Arnold found some comfort in his trouble, some hours of refreshment. They saved him from himself. In the physical peace of the one, and in the moral peace he was conscious of in the other, he attained so much of the resemblance of rest that he believed in its possibility. When he speaks of natural beauty, he loses his self-inquiring self. ”

“ This solemn love and reverence for the continuous life of the physical universe may remind us that Arnold's teaching about humanity, subtle and searching as it is, has done less to endear him to many of his disciples, than his feeling for Nature. His is the kind of Nature-worship which takes nothing at second-hand. ”

“ Arnold turned to the schoolmistress, who was smiling from her perch on a pile of wet logs.
“I'm perfectly happy!” she said. “This east wind takes me home. I hear the bluebirds, and smell the salt-marshes and the wood-mosses. I'm not sure but that when the fog lifts we shall see white caps in the valley.”
“I dare say there are some very good people down there,” said Arnold, with deliberation, “but all the same I should welcome an inundation. Think what a climate this would be, if we could have the sea below us, knocking against the rocks on still nights, and thundering at us in a storm!” ”

“ One fifteenth-century writer gives a recipe for catching a unicorn. 'A maid is set where he hunteth and she openeth her lap, to whom the unicorn, as seeking rescue from the force of the hunter, yieldeth his head and leaveth all his fierceness, and resteth himself under her protection, sleepeth until he is taken and slain.' But although many were reported to be thus enticed to their destruction, only their horns, strange to say, ever reached Europe. ”

“ He pursued the chase on Ullin, on the moss-covered top of Drumardo.--Ossian, Temora, ii.
Ullin’s Daughter (Lord) , a young lady who eloped with the chief of Ulva’s Isle, and induced a boatman to row them over Lochgyle during a storm. The boat was capsized just as Lord Ullin and his retinue reached the shore. He saw the peril, he cried in agony, “Come back, come back! and I’ll forgive your Highland chief;” but it was too late, the “waters wild rolled o’er his child, and he was left lamenting.”--Campbell, Lord Ullin’s Daughter (a ballad) .
Ulric, son of Werner (i.e., count of Siegendorf) . ”

“ If you find yourself in a village fair you do well to examine the booths, and when you bring your purchases home, the domestic authority will be wise not to scan too severely the trivial wares never meant to please a critical taste or to last a lifetime. Mr. Arnold certainly brought home some very queer things from his village fair, and was perhaps too fond of taking them for the texts of his occasional discourses. But others must find fault, we cannot. There is a pleasant ripple of life through Mr. Arnold's prose writings. His judgments are human judgments. ”

“ Now for a man already invested with a colonel's commission, as Arnold was, to be weighed and measured by men whom he did not, and could not recognize as his superiors, holding no rank whatever of their own, and by the very nature of their errand casting suspicion on himself and his own character, it is a rather hard thing, it will be confessed on all sides. ”

“ This class embraces those who cannot comprehend God; they lack capacity for the intelligent worship of Deity. The subnormal beings of Urantia have a corps of seraphim, one company, with one battalion of cherubim, assigned to minister to them and to witness that justice and mercy are extended to them in the life struggles of the sphere.
2. The average, normal type of human mind. From the standpoint of seraphic ministry, most men and women are grouped in seven classes in accordance with their status in making the circles of human progress and spiritual development. ”

“ So now when I see him pass through the churchyard or up and down the village street and note that he is affable as ever when he sees me, but growing more and more preoccupied with his own thoughts I do not know whether to look upon him with execration or profoundest pity, nor can any man guide me or satisfy my mind as to [121] whether I should blame his jealousy or Orrin's pride for the pitiful tragedy which once darkened my life, and turned our pleasant village into a desert. ”

“ Arnold ever realised the devotedness his verse inspired in the minds of thousands of his countrymen and countrywomen, both in the old world and the new. He is not a bulky poet. Three volumes contain him. But hardly a page can be opened without the eye lighting on verse which at one time or another has been, either to you or to someone dear to you, strength or joy. The Buried Life, A Southern Night, Dover Beach, A Wanderer is Man from his Birth, Rugby Chapel, Resignation. ”