Foreboding

“ To every one of us, in the course of our lives, something quite as extraordinary has befallen more than once. What shall we say of omens, warnings, forebodings? What of the most curious runs of luck; the most whimsical freaks of fortune; the unaccountable things that happen round us daily, and no one marvels at them, till he reads of them in print? ”

“ What if he resides at the Lodge, in the very neighbourhood of———? Oh! my good friend, I fear I am deceiving myself: I fear I am preparing for the heart of the best of fathers, a mortal disappointment. When the throes of wounded pride shall have subsided, when the resentments of a doat-ing, a deceived heart, shall have gradually abated, and the recollection of former blisses shall have soothed away the pangs of recent suffering; will I then submit to the dictates of an imperious duty, or resign myself unresisting to the influence of morbid apathy? ”

“ Phrases like "to sit on thorns," "to be on pins and needles," "to drain the cup of misery to the dregs," show with graphic power the folly and curse of worry. Why should one sit on thorns, or on pins and needles? If one does so accidentally he arises in a hurry, yet in worrying, one seems deliberately, with intent, to sit down upon prickles in order to compel himself to discomfort, distress, and pain. Is there any wisdom, when one has the cup of misery at his lips, in deliberately keeping it there, and persistently drinking it to the "very dregs"? ”

“ All that was evil in him came to the surface; the fear that anybody might forcibly frustrate his revenge—if he chose to revenge himself—raised a demon in him that blanched his naturally pallid face and started his lip muscles into that curious recession which, in animals, is the first symptom of the snarl. ”

“ The youth, who seem'd to watch a time for sin,
Approach'd the careless guide, and thrust him in;
Plunging he falls, and rising lifts his head,
Then flashing turns, and sinks amongst the dead.
⁠Wild, sparkling rage inflames the father's eyes,
He bursts the bands of fear, and madly cries,
Detested wretch—but scarce his speech began,
When the strange partner seem'd no longer man. ”

“ That treat nought else but pleasure and delight.
If any spark of human rests in thee,
Forbear; begone; tender the suit of me.
ENVY. Why, so I will; forbearance shall be such,
As treble death shall cross thee with despite,
And make thee mourn, where most thou joyest,
Turning thy mirth into a deadly dole:
Whirling thy pleasures with a peal of death,
And drench thy methods in a sea of blood.
This will I do; thus shall I bear with thee;
And, more to vex thee with a deeper spite,
I will with threats of blood begin thy play:
Favouring thee with envy and with hate. ”

“ Hereupon it is that the appetites will be tormented with the fury of their own passions, which will come forth in bands, and with great vehemence, namely, fears, melancholy, irksomeness, agonies, anger, desperation, envy, and rage, with such a cruel war among themselves that they will rend one another in pieces. ”

“ Why am I called upon to do this, oh cruel, most cruel destiny? Cannot I fly from the horrid scene? Cannot I rather run a dagger into my heart? But no, 'tis plain my fate is ordained, sealed, fixed! and in vain I struggle,—I must fulfil the task appointed for me! ”

“ When we review the abnormal or morbid forms of the affective life: destructive impulses, phobias, incurable melancholy, sexual perversions, failure of the moral sense, insanity of doubt, etc., and seek their causes, we at once find some which are proximate or immediate. Among the most frequent are physical maladies, injuries to the head, sudden shocks, as in railway accidents; sorrow, whatever its origin, whether love, ambition, ruin, separation ”

“ Those puerile fears, followed by hopes, without rule or aim, that vain confidence giving place to sad discouragement. Those despondent feelings after moments of zealous fever, during which we seem to be able to do and attempt everything. Here we find the solution of those sudden and varied shades of temperament which will instantaneously cheer or prostrate the energies of the soul. ”

“ As autumn approached, with faint notice on his part, his anger and resentment retreated, leaving in their wake a gentle stir of regret and remorse. Imperceptibly, he grew physically weary; a strange sensation of loneliness and isolation enveloped him. A species of timidity came upon him; he felt an unhappy remoteness from people, and began to edge away from life. ”

“ We will do nothing hastily; but I certainly feel at present as if redemption was offered from a bondage which wears the soul and sickens the heart of man. There’s my poor father——”
“Stay, stay, Frank. What do you mean by bondage?”
“The bondage of poverty, Sir; of hopeless, grinding poverty. What bondage cows a man’s spirit more? What sours and debases and goads him more than to work and work from year to year in vain? If it was a curse upon Adam to get bread by the sweat of his brow, what is it to give the sweat of one’s brow and get no bread?”bread?” ”

“ I realized that a great crisis in my life was approaching, and that if I failed in it I might permanently lose my self-esteem. Already in the wood I was troubled by a multitude of voices—the voices of the hill beneath me, of the trees over my head, of the very insects in the bark of the tree. I could even hear the stream licking little pieces out of the meadows, and the meadows dreamily protesting. Above the din—which is no louder than the flight of a bee—rose the Faun's voice saying, "Dear priest, be placid, be placid: why are you frightened?" ”

“ The spectacle of his sufferings, his imminent danger, and the sobs and lamentations of his inconsolable wife, awaken in his soul the affections of a father. A faint ray of reason penetrates his mind, and he perceives all the horrors of his proceeding. Trouble, remorse, repentance, succeed; his heart is wrung with anguish, and he attempts his own life. ”

“ But the sudden and violent change in your whole disposition, has proved only too plainly, that some concealed and unfortunate event—some mysterious adventure, at which we cannot guess, is the cause of your melancholy; which cause, however remote, still continues to exercise over you the same destructive influence. ”

“ Rage and despair are in my heart, and hurry me to madness. My home is horror to me—I'll not return to't. Speak quickly; tell me, if in this wreck of fortune, one hope remains? Name it, and be my oracle.
Stu. To vent your curses on—You have bestowed them liberally. Take your own counsel: and should a desperate hope present itself, 'twill suit your desperate fortune. I'll not advise you.
Bev. What hope? By heaven! I'll catch at it, however desperate. I am so sunk in misery, it cannot lay me lower.
Stu. You have an uncle.
Bev. Ay. What of Him?
Stu. Old men live long by temperance ”

“ Human endurance could bear no more; and, after one or two stern warnings, No. 3, whose wrath had been gradually gathering, suddenly saw her opportunity, and, darting upon two small tormentors before they could escape, she brought down her umbrella upon their degenerate backs with as much force as nature had supplied to her. ”

“ The terrifying images which deter him from crime and follow its commission, and which are really the protest of his deepest self, seem to his wife the creations of mere nervous fear, and are sometimes referred by himself to the dread of vengeance or the restlessness of insecurity. ”

“ It's not in me.
My sinking heart I pray Thee raise
So shall I give it Thee.
My life as spider's webb's cut off,
Thus fainting have I said,
And living man no more shall see
But be in silence laid. ”

“ Who can picture to himself without horror the dreadful moments which lingered as they passed, and seemed endless in the anxiety of suspense! There the poor fellow lay, in speechless agony, the fated witness of barbarity the most revolting. ”

“ It was the sculptured counterfeit of a human face, that of a man distraught with agony. The eyes stared wildly from their sockets, the hair straggled in maniac disorder, the forehead was wrung with torture, the cheeks sunken, the throat fearsomely wasted, and from the wide lips there seemed to be issuing a horrible cry. ”

“ When the people are asked what would be the consequence of breaking a taboo, they generally say that the person or thing would suffer for it, either by meeting with a mishap or by falling ill. But some say they do not so much fear a misfortune as experience an indefinite feeling, half fear, half reverence, towards an institution of their forefathers. ”

“ Am I not trudging on and on through life, dragging the horror of it behind me through the mud, except when the horror drags me? To whom am I to turn—to other beasts like him?—sitting patiently around, grinning and slavering, awaiting their turn when the horror of it crushes me to the mud? ”

“ For a wounded heart no balm is so efficacious as forbearance.
To forbear is to forget every night the little vexations of the past day; to say every morning: "To-day I shall be braver and calmer than yesterday." Forbearance even sometimes leads us to detect in ourselves a little want of good nature, condescension, and charity. ”

“ His person was now almost as changed as his fate: it was worn away by suffering, by fatigue, by internal conflicts, and faded by its exposure to the varying clime; the experience of human frailty in himself, and of human turpitude in others, marked his brow with traces of distrust and disappointment;—his enthusiasm was fled! his zeal subdued by the fatal consequences of its unsuccessful efforts! and love, and affliction, and shame, and indignation, the opprobrium he endured, and the innocence he could not establish ”

“ I have mentioned several penances, in different parts of this narrative, which we sometimes had to perform. There is a great variety of them; and, while some, though trifling in appearance, became very painful, by long endurance, or frequent repetition; others are severe in their nature, and would never be submitted to unless through fear of something worse, or a real belief in efficacy to remove guilt. ”

“ And what if into an unsteady heart and brain, intoxicated with splendour, the outward chaos should find its way, converting the poor silly soul into an image of the same confusion,—if conscience should be deposed from her high place, and the Pandora box be broken loose of passions and sensualities and follies; and at length there be nothing left of all which man or woman ought to value, save hope of God's forgiveness. ”

“ But in a little time came a relapse, and another repentance, and then a relapse again, and gradually the return of old habits and the flooding in of all his old way of life, with more violence and gloom, in proportion as the man was alarmed and exasperated by the remembrance of his despised, but terrible, warning. ”

“ I hung over her in the deepest despair, and having lost all sense of prudence and of self-preservation, I acted so much up to my own feelings, that if the men around me had had the smallest suspicion of my real situation, nothing could have saved me from destruction. ”

“ Weary and dispirited, with a vague presentiment of evil, he flung himself on his bed, and a heavy stupor stole over him, binding his faculties in a lethargic slumber from which he did not arouse until the new day began to wax toward its meridian. ”

“ Thus the dogma of the fall is not simply the expression of a special and transitory state of human reason and morality: it is the spontaneous confession, in symbolic phrase, of this fact as astonishing as it is indestructible, the culpability, the inclination to evil, of our race. Curse upon me a sinner! cries on every hand and in every tongue the conscience of the human race. ”

“ The dead rules the living; forgotten incidents, soul-wrecking mistakes, chance misfortunes still dominate us. [130] We recall the mortification of a decade or two ago and as its details are resurrected, we again live through the madness of past years. Prejudices are thus built up, unreasonable indeed. We become averse to a face that reminds us of a countenance belonging to a person who troubled us. ”

“ The [2] "forlorn hope" had suddenly become a triumphant hope. The worm had turned, and turned with a vengeance. Pale and panting, plastered with mud and drenched with sweat, with "blood in their eyes" and here and there a little on their features, they faced the "big fellows" and gave as good as they took. ”

“ He passed the remainder of the night in dreadful agony, sometimes sitting silent and motionless—gazing into vacancy, as if his faculties were bewildered and lost, and then suddenly starting up, amazed and trembling, and staring wildly about, as if seized with a sudden frenzy. ”

“ As they consumed the last grain of their powder in this operation, they became susceptible but of one emotion,—that of indescribable horror, at the idea of being compelled, ere another night should elapse, to pay the debt of nature in a manner the most abhorrent to their feelings. ”

“ Ahead of her loomed, only dimly discerned as yet, the ordeal of strenuous monotony; the deadly-dull, prolonged grind wherein endurance, as it hardens, is subjected to a constantly harsher strain, until the soul revolts as, in the earlier stage, the body had rebelled. ”

“ As of a hungry agonized spirit standing outside its wretched body, and watching its feeble movements, conscious of their futility, conscious of being chained to the miserable thing, and only knowing rebellion and agony. ”

“ The things thou desirest can last but an hour. As to me, however, I quaff continually in the path of God the cup of His decree, and wish not that the ruling of His will should cease to operate, or that the woes I suffer for the sake of my Lord, the Most Exalted, the All-Glorious, should be ended. Seek thou my wish and forsake thine own. Thy bondage is not for my protection, but to enable me to sustain successive tribulations, and to prepare me for the trials that must needs repeatedly assail me. ”