Broadside

“ As at evening one sees the village lights come out, one by one, along the slopes, so I could see the lights of our house shining out even beyond our own horizon, to the ends of the world, and even beyond the world. They were shining for the absent as well as for the present, for Mélanie at the bedside of the poor, for Stephen at Rome, and for Bernard, soldier of the outposts in his far distant colony. ”

“ In a word, 'tis good to love in this land of France. I appeal to our authentic doctors in this science, and even to our courtesans, which will be more apt than I to elaborate subtle details thereanent. And to tell the very truth: harlots are there in all lands, and cuckolds the same, as myself can surely testify, for that I have seen all the countries I have named, and others to boot. Chastity abideth not in one quarter of the earth more than another. ”

“ She could feel the earth begin to tremble from the rush of pounding hoofs and saw the ominous cloud rolling nearer and nearer. There was no time to flee; no chance to reach the trees; only now could she rush to that projecting boulder and cast her body close against it in the hope that the frantic steers might not crumble it in pieces in their mad onslaught.
What was that she heard? She hesitated an instant as she neared the rock whose unpromising shelter she sought. Surely she heard someone calling her name. “Bess—Bess,” the agonized tones came to her ears! ”

“ As they lounged down the principal street Ernest was struck with the change in the appearance of the crowd16 which thronged one side of the footway, between the bisecting cross-streets. The hard and anxious faces of the world’s workers which had filled the pavement in the morning had vanished, and in their stead were the flowerets of fashion, the gilded youth of the land, the butterflies of society, the fair faces of daintily attired girls, the unworn features of those ornamental human types which comprise no toilers, whatever may be the proportion of spinsters. ”

“ I should say that our "existence" is like a bridge—except that that comparison is in static terms—but like the Brooklyn Bridge, upon which multitudes of bugs are seeking a fundamental—coming to a girder that seems firm and final—but the girder is built upon supports. ”

“ Lastly, imagine the picture of a town, a town which is not horizontal but perpendicular, with streets standing up like ladders and, along these arteries, the Shapes rising like balloons. This is the first vision; and, right at the top of the town, the Shapes come crowding from every side, gathering upon a vast horizontal space, where they swarm like ants. ”

“ After five or ten minutes spent hi watching curiously the one little street, with the long hitching poles planted firmly and frequently down both sides—usually within a very few steps of a saloon door—and the horses nodding and stamping at the flies, and the loitering figures that appeared now and then in desultory fashion, many of them imagined that they understood the West and sympathized with it, and appreciated its bigness and its freedom from conventions. ”

“ When you have not got a compass it is quite easy to judge this by the sun. The sun gets up in the east and sets in the west and in the middle of the day it is due south of you if you are in the northern part of the world. A Brownie must understand this and the different points of the compass before she can be considered a good useful messenger. ”

“ They passed no villages; for a hall that has to house many men must stand alone amid the wide fields and pasture lands needed to supply its occupants with food. The cocks were crying their first challenge from distant hamlets when Hengist’s division caught the loom of the Jutish palisade, a deeper shadow against the night, a little down the road. ”

“ As you are an old hand in the woods, Bruce, I consider you quite fit to head one party, and try Scott’s Bay. For my part, I will take another party, and make for Hall’s Harbor. What do you say to that?”
“O, no, sir,” said Bruce; “we won’t leave you. We’ll stay with you, and follow you wherever you go.”
The doctor laughed.
“O, nonsense!” said he. “If we were wandering in the forests of the Amazon valley, we might then make it a matter of duty to stand by one another; but these woods are only a small affair. By going in any direction, we must emerge from them before very long. ”

“ In the austere boreal regions of the Old World all nature, dormant or pulsating, dumb or informed with speech, waits and hopes, prays and fears, until the unseen relaxation of the grasp of the winter god. ”

“ Outside, in what was called the big world, things were going on with frantic hurry and change, but in here the leisured calm was huge, gigantic, so much so that the other dwindled into a kind of lost remoteness. ”

“ The square fronts of houses peep down on you as you run beneath; constant footbridges overhead give to the thin light of day a constant shudder and quiver. We, who are not made for strong impressions, are ourselves inclined to shudder. ”

“ Tiny rills and springheads show a well-watered country—'a land that drinks the rain of Heaven at will.' Ever and anon the willow, with foliage of vivid tender green, contrasts with the sombre filaments of the river oak.
My companion is an active, intelligent young fellow—a native-born Australian, whose fair hair and steadfast grey-blue eyes show that the Anglo-Saxon type is not likely to alter materially in Southern Britain. ”

“ What I loved was the earth, the vast unnamed earth, and not this place or that; most of all I loved the uncultivated places, the wild places in the woods, the copses, the secret nooks, and in less degree the pasture lands, any untilled, unsowed: bit of earth. In the matter of people, I had accepted grandfather’s new gospel which catalogued them as peasants and towns people. The nice people were in the country, whereas towns were inhabited by wicked individuals and notably by bourgeois, who persecute men of genius like my friends of the café. ”

“ Over all the landscape there is a look of plaintive uncontent. The distant town, with its two church-spires, is choked and effaced in mist: the very sun is sickly and irresolute. All Nature seems to say, "Have pity upon me—I die!" ”

“ Boundaries.—​The children having got the idea of direction, it will be quite easy to introduce that of boundaries—such and such a turnip field, for instance, is bounded by the highroad on the south, by a wheat crop on the south-east, a hedge on the north-east, and so on; the children getting by degrees the idea that the boundaries of a given space are simply whatever touches it on every side. Thus one crop may touch another without any dividing line, and therefore one crop bounds the other. ”

“ Let it be as active as the ocean—as free as the wind—as universal as the sun-beams! Lord Brougham said very wisely, "If the higher classes are afraid of being left in the rear, they likewise must hasten onward." ”

“ A curious impression that you are reaching the end of all things is followed by the feeling that your next step will be planted in the sea—and then you come to Broadwater.
p. 2The huge square-set building stands on a level plateau, guarded by a semicircle of hills from every wind that blows, excepting the south-west. The architecture is neither impressive in itself nor characteristic of any particular period. ”

“ Stronger than any man he was, before or since, for the work. All Brodie knew, all the Indians knew, all that a life's experience, eating, living, watching, sleeping with the big river, had taught him, that Healey knew. And when Brodie's bridge went out, Healey was ready with his new bridge for the Spider Water, which should be better than Brodie's, just as he was better than Brodie. ”

“ Choosing the largest thoroughfare, he made his way west to that exalted region of melancholy squares and enrailed melancholy gardens where the fashionables and would-be fashionables of the earth congregate in freewill or compulsory exclusiveness. ”

“ In its brief and narrow course of a few hundred yards, the richest in literary associations of any region on earth, the weather-beaten, irregular fronts of its old stone houses look down affectionately, and perhaps pityingly, on hurrying journalists and anxious authors, as they have been doing for ages. ”

“ Seven Vigils obeyed the daily summons, clad, boy and girl, in cotton stuff of precisely the hue of their skin. Bobbing through the gate, one after another, they were like a family of little dun-colored prairie-dogs, of a hue with their adobe dwelling, shy and brown and bright-eyed. ”

“ Without counting that if a vertical descent of sixteen leagues costs us a horizontal of eighty-five, we shall have to go about either thousand leagues to the southeast, and we must therefore come out somewhere in the circumferences long before we can hope to reach the center. ”

“ Mr. Brodie’s Lyrics of the Sea are spirited and manly, and show a certain freedom of rhythmical movement, pleasant in days of wooden verse. He is at his best, however, in his sonnets. Their architecture is not always of the finest order but, here and there, one meets with lines that are graceful and felicitous.
Like silver swallows on a summer morn
Cutting the air with momentary wings,
is pretty, and on flowers Mr. Brodie writes quite charmingly. The only thoroughly bad piece in the book is The Workman’s Song. Nothing can be said in favour of
Is there a bit of blue, boys? ”

“ For the first time in his life he really looked at the houses which stood so close to his own.
There were twelve houses in one street—seven on one side, five on the other. Twelve narrow houses, for there were no rooms in them, only two long flights of stairs in each house. ”

“ She is looking straight before her, at the landscape simmering in the climbing sun, the divine landscape new and young as it was before duomo and bell-tower sprang and towered heavenwards. Why should her gaze dwell any more upon him? ”

“ A glance shows its feudal relation to, and dependence upon, the great house behind which it nestles; some of the back-kitchens and offices of this great house, indeed, straggle out till they meet and merge themselves into this quadrangle. None the less, it presents to the enquiring gaze a specific character, of as old a growth, one might think, as the oak itself. Here servants have lived, it may be, since man first learned the trick of setting his foot on his brother's neck. ”

“ A hundred years from now, people will be laughing at our imbecile acquiescence in such a theory, as we now laugh at the imbecile acquiescence of whole provinces and kingdoms in the Middle Ages, passed from the hand of one master to another, because somebody had married somebody else.”
Mme. Brodard used to say resignedly, that she minded such editorials least of all. “That is a principle that will never touch our lives!” she said with melancholy conviction, for her modest dowry was the extent of their fortune and of their expectations. ”

“ To listen to a yet more thrilling lay.
Not all alone we wander o’er the sward:
⁠A little merry sprite, half black, half “tan,”
⁠More than a dog, and yet not quite a man,
Is our companion, jester, friend, and guard.
Just half-way up the road a gentle rise
⁠Reveals the lane, and there, with mingled hope
⁠And fear, I search each grassy curve and slope
For her who is so pleasant in my eyes.
She often comes to meet me: will she come,
⁠And stand just in the corner of the lane?
⁠She is my Home! Oh! ”

“ Looking to the north, an immense curved line shows itself, growing ever greater, opening like the arch of a gigantic bridge, and binding this first group to a second, more complicated, each peak of which has a form of its own, and does in some sort as it pleases without troubling itself about its neighbor. ”

“ A long walk through smooth, asphaltum-paved streets bordered by blocks of vast new mercantile houses of cream-colored stone,—every house and every block precisely like all the other houses and all the other blocks for a mile, and all brilliantly lighted,—brought us at last to the principal thoroughfare. ”

“ He contemplated the world's work as exemplified around Our Square. His gaze came to rest upon a steam-roller, ponderously clanking over a railed-off portion of the street. “I suppose I could run that.”
“Could you? That's a man's job at least. Have you ever run one?” ”

“ I proceeded to mount the hill; from root to root, and from branch to branch, lay my journey: it was finished, and I sat down upon the highest brow to meditate on future trials. No road lay along this side of the river, which was rugged and sterile, and farms were sparingly dispersed over it: to reach one of these was now the object of my wishes. ”

“ No one instituted a campaign to locate the business center of a city at precisely such a square or corner. Things aggregate, and the point to which they tend is their center; they make it, it does not make them. ”

“ Sooth to say, we have reached at length the mystic region where there is no 'want of tin.' It occurs everywhere in abundance—in new ground, in old workings, in mullock, in trenches, in each and every conceivable place. ”

“ We should acquire the habit of speaking of the flower-border. The border planting of which we have spoken sets bounds to the place, and makes it one’s own. The person lives inside his place, not on it. ”

“ Now that she is at the bottom, she sees a porter who is combing—as she would like to express it—just such a tree—that is, who is plucking thick bunches of hair from it, which hang from it like moss. Other workmen have chopped off such boughs in a garden, and have thrown them upon the street, where they lie about, so that many people take some of them. ”