William Sharp

“ You never thought that perhaps there were two bodies down there in the pool! Ay, for sure, for sure: Màm-Gorm was not the man to die alone!"
"Perhaps ... Murdo, perhaps it was ... perhaps it was ... he who...."
The words failed. The gaunt shepherd looked down at the speaker, frowning darkly.
"May be, may be," he muttered at last. "If I thought that, I would be letting him lie in his own house. Nial, see that no word o' this gets upon your lips if you meet anyone. No one must think that. No one in the Strath must think an evil thing o' Màm-Gorm." ”

“ It was soon evident that the noise and confused magnetism of the great City weighed disastrously on William Sharp. At the New Year, 1895, he wrote to a friend:
“London I do not like, though I feel its magnetic charm, or sorcery. I suffer here. The gloom, the streets, the obtrusion and intrusion of people, all conspire against thought, dream, true living. It is a vast reservoir of all the evils of civilised life with a climate which makes me inclined to believe that Dante came here instead of to Hades.” ”

“ Because of her beauty, her strong sense of life and of the joy of life; because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek and Celtic days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked new doors in his mind and put him “in touch with ancestral memories” of his race. So, for a time, he stilled the critical, intellectual mood of William Sharp to give play to the development of this new found expression of subtler emotions, towards which he had been moving with all the ardour of his nature. ”

“ Dumb, motionless, staring unwaveringly: so was she at the flame-red setting, as she had been since the first blaze had lightened along the peaks of the east.
X It was within an hour of nightfall when, from the verge of the forest below Màm-Gorm, Nial caught sight of the kye coming down from the hill-pastures. He could not see Sorcha, but he knew she must be there; probably with Alan, who for days past had been wont to depute his own shepherding on Tornideon to a herd-laddie who lived with an old drover just beyond the Pass of the Eagles. ”

“ To be alive and young and in health, is a boon so inestimable that you ought to fall on your knees among your moorland heather and thank the gods. Dejection is a demon to be ruled. We cannot always resist his tyranny, but we can always refuse to become bondagers to his usurpation. Look upon him as an Afreet to be exorcised with a cross of red-hot iron. He is a coward weakling, after all: take him by the tail and swing him across the moor or down the valley. Swing up into your best.
Be brave, strong, self-reliant. Then you live.
Your friend
William Sharp. ”

“ As a whole, he characterizes Sharp's book as "the production of a mind unjustly exasperated against a people, whose individuals either knew him not, or, if they knew him, treated him with benevolence and civility, as they do all the English, and all other strangers who visit their country." ”

“ SHARP, ABRAHAM (1651–1742) , mathematician, younger son of John Sharp of Little Horton, by Mary, daughter of Robert Clarkson of Bradford (married 12 Dec. 1632) , was born in 1651 at Little Horton, near Bradford, and baptised 1 June 1653 (pedigree in Thoresby's Leeds, 1816, p. 37) . After attending Bradford grammar school he was apprenticed to William Shaw, mercer of York, and then to a merchant at Manchester, but he gave up his business and moved to Liverpool, where he taught and devoted himself to mathematics. Here he met John Flamsteed [q. v.] ”

“ In silence the twain walked through the gloaming that was already the mirk, till they came to the white gate, where the asses and camels breathed wearily in the sultry darkness, with dry tongues moving round parched mouths. ”

“ Both march from horizon to horizon in ordered majesty, though when they seem like idle vapours motionlessly suspended along the blue walls of heaven they are rustling their sheaves of frost-fire armour, are soaring to more than twenty thousand feet above the earth, and are surging onward with impetuous rush at the rate of from seventy to eighty miles an hour. ”

“ Amongst these, was the firm belief that no young woman could possibly refuse a tolerable match, and partiality having, perhaps, represented the offer of his own hand as something beyond the average of good luck in the case of Miss Sharp, it was too much for his philosophy to find such a flaw in a theory which might have otherwise lasted to the end of his days, and not only this vexation in the abstract, but the particular sting of furnishing the contradiction in his own person. ”

“ On making inquiries among the men whether any of them knew how to dress the skins, Dick Sharp said that he had been apprenticed to a currier, and thought, if he could obtain some suitable bark, he should be able to dress the skins, and make them fit for any purpose which might be required.
“Very well,” said Harry; “we must appoint you to that duty; and, doctor, it must be your charge to look out for bark with tanning properties.” ”

“ Night lay passively upon the sea, upon the isle, upon the clachan. Not a light lingered in any cottage, save the fire-glow in that of Mary Maclean: a hollow, attenuating beam that stared through the dark unwaveringly. ”

“ You see things must be made even somehow, and somewhere, and such a sinner as you have been deserves all this and more too.
Then, there was Mr. Sharp, who kept green and growing the shoots that Mr. Sliman had sprouted. "Attendance" was Mr. Sharp's hobby. He kept a blackboard in the front hall of his school house, where it would be the first thing any one would see when he came into the building, and on this he scored the record of attendance every day. ”

“ Beautiful this austere Diadem worn by aged and lonely women: sweet-eyed bearers of crowns among the myriad procession of the weary poor of all the world, all going gloriously apparelled and wreathed with green garlands which fade not in the sight of Him who leadeth His feeble folk to kingship and honour. ”

“ For three hours Arcturus will pulsate in it like a white flame. Other planets will rise, and other stars. Their silver feet tread the depths in silence. Sometimes the moon thrusts long yellow lances down into its brooding heart, or will lie on its breast like the curled horn of the honeysuckle, or, in autumn, like a floating shell filled with fires of phosphorescence. ”

“ There he would walk swiftly and eagerly along the solitary and lightless byways, finding a potent stimulus to imaginative thought in the happy isolation thus enjoyed, with all the concurrent delights of natural things, the wind moving like a spirit through the tree-branches, the drifting of poignant fragrances, even in winter-tide, from herb and sappy bark, imperceptible almost by the alertest sense in the day's manifold detachments. ”

“ The tide called in a loud insistent whisper, rising to a hoarse gurgle, from the Sound. The breeze that came from the mountains of Mull was honey-sweet with heather smell. The bleating of the ewes and lambs, the screaming of a few gulls,—nothing else was audible. At times, it is true, like a deep sigh, the suspiration of the open sea rose and fell among the islands. ”

“ In the cities of Holland, how at one are the old houses with the mirroring canals, in still afternoons when quiet light warms the red wall, and dwells on the brown and scarlet clematis in the cool violet and amber hollows of the motionless water wherein the red wall soundlessly slips and indefinitely recedes, hiding an undiscovered house of shadow with silent unseen folk dreaming out across invisible gardens. ”

“ And, after all, why am I to be considered inferior to my fellows because I love passionately in her every manifestation the mother who has borne us all, and to whom much that is noblest in art is due!... ”

“ But there is life and movement in the play of the wind among the grasses and lentisks, in the hum of insects, in the whisper of the warm earth, in the glow of the burning sunshine that floods downward from a sky of glorious blue. ”

“ Then Molios saw.
And what he saw was a strangeness and a terror to him. For everywhere were green lives, fair and comely, gentle-eyed, lovely, of a soft shining. From tree to tree they flitted, or passed to and fro from the tree-boles, as wild bees from their hives.
Beside Cathal stood a woman. Beautiful she was, with eyes like stars in the gloaming. All of green flame she seemed, though the old monk saw her breast rise and fall, and the light lift of her earth-brown hair by a wind-breath eddying there, and the hand of her clasped in that of Cathal. ”

“ But the mass of the western firmament was yellow, from the orange-yellow of lichen and the orange-red of the dandelion to the faint vanishing yellows of cowslip and primrose. How lovely then were the trees which had been set on fire by the unconsuming flames of the sunset: what a fairyland, now, of delicate amber and translucent topaz. ”

“ You in your far Provence, amid the austere hills that guard an ancient land of olive and vine, a land illumined by the blue flowing light of the Rhone, and girt by desert places where sun and wind inhabit, and scarce any other—you there and I here have this in common. Everywhere we see the life of man in subservient union with the life of Nature ”

“ Nothing visible but green depths fading into green depths, and fringing the sky-lines the endless surf of boughs and branches. From the forest-glades the cooing of doves and the travelling-voice of a flowing cool sweet wind of this delicious morning. I always gain immensely in mind and body from nearness to woodlands and green growth—hence in no small part my feeling for Fontainebleau. ”

“ I expect and believe that I shall find Rome beautiful in many things, even as she is already majestic and wonderful—and that the more one becomes acquainted with the Eternal City the more one loves or at least reverences and delights in it. ”

“ It is a happiness to me to know that you feel so deeply the beauty that has been so humbly and eagerly and often despairingly sought, and that in some dim measure, at least, is held here as a shaken image in troubled waters. ”

“ These poor mountains!—once, long ago, bright and joyous with colour and sound and winds and waters and birds—and now without a tree to give shadow where grass will never again grow, save here and there a stunted and withered olive, like some plague-stricken wretch still lingering amongst the decayed desolation of his birthplace—without the music and light of running water, save, perhaps twice amidst their parched and serried flanks a crawling, muddy, hideous liquid ”

“ Sorcha glanced through the flame-lit dusk: a smile on her face, sweet as the dream in her beautiful eyes. The father asleep; Oona crooning before the peats; Nial, quiet hound of Oona, with dark eyes staring up at her from where he lay on the floor: she need not fear to leave, and go out to the roofed hay-room, where Alan's arms yearned for her, where his heart beat for her, where his lips were warm in the dark, where the dear whisper of his voice was the echo of the white song that clapped its hands rejoicing in the sunbower in the hollow of her heart. ”

“ There is not a hidden glen among the lost hills, there is not an unvisited shore, there is not a city swathed in smoke and drowned in many clamours, where light is not a continual miracle, where from dayset to dawn, from the rising of the blue to the gathering of shadow, the wind is not habitual as are the reinless, fierce, unswerving tides of the sea. ”

“ It made me feel almost sick and ill, looking from the ruined citadel out upon these stony, dreary, lifeless, hopeless hills—and I had again and again to find relief in the beauty of more immediate surroundings—the long grasses waving in the buttresses of the citadel, the beautiful yellow (absolutely stainless in colour) wallflowers sprouting from every chink and cranny, and the green and gray lizards darting everywhere and shining in the sunlight. ”

“ With what abrupt turbulence the calms are violated, with what a gathering sound the invisible host is marshalled, with what impetuous surge the immeasurable sortie advances! Of a sudden those little shallows in the sands, those little weed-hung pools below slippery rocks covered with mussel and dog-whelk, shiver. A faint undulation thrills the still small world. ”

“ May the flowers carry to your poet-soul a breath of that happy life which seems to inspire them—and may your coming years be full of the beauty and fragrance of which they are the familiar and exquisite symbols. ”

“ Where the Carthaginians lived in magnificent luxury, a little out of the city itself, is now the Arab town of Sidi-ban-Saïd—like a huge magnolia-bloom on the sunswept hillside. There is nothing of the life of to-day visible, save a white-robed Bedouin herding goats and camels, and, on the sea, a few felucca-rigged fisherboats making for distant Tunis by the Strait of Goletta. ”

“ But my mind is like a troubled sea, whereon the winds of doubt blow continually, with waves of dead hopes and religious beliefs washing far away behind, and nothing before but the weary seeming of phantasmal shores. At times this faith that I cherish comes down upon me like the hushful fall of snow-flakes, calming and soothing all into peace ”

“ Then the forest wearies of this interminable exuberance, this daily and nightly charm of exultant life. It desires another spell, the enchantment of silence, of dreams. One day the songs cease: the nests are cold. In the lush meadows the hare sleeps, the corncrake calls. By the brook the cattle stand, motionless, or with long tails rhythmically a-swing and ears a-twitch above the moist amber-violet dreamless eyes. The columnar trees are like phantom-smoke of secret invisible fires. In the green-glooms of the forest a sigh is heard. ”