Hatter

“ Was this witchcraft or only some clever conjuring trick? I asked myself the question, but could give it no satisfactory answer. At any rate you may be sure it did not lessen my respect for my singular companion.
"Ah! I am right then!" he cried exultingly. "Isn't it strange how the love of being right remains with us, when we think we have safely combated every other self-conceit? Well, Mr. Hatteras, I am very pleased to have made your acquaintance. ”

“ Alice gently remarked; “they’d have been ill.”
“So they were,” said the Dormouse; “very ill.”
Alice tried to fancy to herself what such an extraordinary way of living would be like, but it puzzled her too much, so she went on: “But why did they live at the bottom of a well?”
“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied in an offended tone, “so I can’t take more.”
“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter: “it’s very easy to take more than nothing.”
“Nobody asked your opinion,” said Alice. ”

“ None takes any charge of me, and no man in the ranks brings comfort to the veteran, unless, perchance, Hather is here, and succours his shattered friend. Whomsoever Hather once thinks worthy of his duteous love, that man he attends continually with even zeal, constant to his purpose, and fearing to break his early ties. ”

“ I half hoped that he would make some allusion to the telegram he had despatched for me that morning, but he was far too cunning for that. He looked me over and over out of his small ferrety eyes before he replied:
"I can not tell you why I think so, Mr. Hatteras, but instinct generally makes us aware when we are not quite all we might be to other people. ”

“ He has been educated thoroughly, and he has all the best traditions of his race kept continually before his eyes. But you must not imagine, Mr. Hatteras, that because he has not mixed with the world he is ignorant of its temptations. ”

“ I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,
The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride;
Of Him who walked in glory and in joy
Behind his plough, upon the mountain-side:
By our own spirits are we deified;
We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness. ”

“ Why, man, you are married," and he came across to Hatteras and shook him by the shoulder. "Don't you understand? You have a wife!"
"I know," said Hatteras. "But there are things deeper at the heart of me than the love of woman, and one of those things is the love of horror. I tell you it bites as nothing else does in this world. It's like absinthe that turns you sick at the beginning and that you can't do without once you have got the taste of it. Do you remember my first landing? It made me sick enough at the beginning, you know. But now—" He sat down in a chair and drew it close to Walker. ”

“ For indeed the souls of those peasants must have been sickened with something of the topsy-turvydom felt by too many peasants of our own time under the frightful flying batteries of scientific war; a blasphemy of inverted battle in which hell itself has occupied heaven. Something of the vapours vomited by such cruel chemistry may have mingled with the dust of battle, and darkened such light as showed where shattering rocks were rending a roof of shields, to men bowed and blinded as they are by such labour of dragging and such a hailstorm of death. ”

“ When a fellow can see his way out of certain ruin by a bit of meanness, or whatever you like to call it, the temptation is very great—is it not? Ha, well, it’s a wicked world, a wicked world. You ought to have been the proprietor of this place, my friend: well, never mind; you must manage to do with a part of it, eh? Yes, with a part of it: half a loaf, you know.”
[Pg 191]
“Half a loaf did you say?” asked the quick-eared servant who had just entered with a tray. “Yes, sir—white or brown?”
“Both,” said Mr. Tallant.
“Yes, sir; what wine will you take, sir?”
“Sherry,” said Mr. Tallant. ”

“ Shaping smiled, and said, ‘How comes it that your wisdom is greater than that of the Master of wisdom?’ Hator said, ‘My wisdom does not come from you, nor from your world, but from that other world, which you, Shaping, have vainly tried to imitate.’ Shaping replied, ‘What, then, do you do in my world?’ Hator said, ‘I am here falsely, and therefore I am subject to your false pleasures. ”

“ We can, however, scarcely explain away the idea of fetters in this case as merely the result of an early association, for it may well be argued that the idea led to this method of self-excitement. "The mere idea of fetters," this subject writes, "produces the greatest excitement, and the sight of pictures representing such things is a temptation. The reading of books dealing with prison life, etc., anywhere where physical restraint is treated of, is a temptation. The temptation is aggravated when the picture represents the person booted. ”

“ HORATIO and MARCELLUS. Ay, by heaven, my lord.
HAMLET. There’s ne’er a villain dwelling in all Denmark But he’s an arrant knave.
HORATIO. There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave To tell us this.
HAMLET. Why, right; you are i’ the right; And so, without more circumstance at all, I hold it fit that we shake hands and part: You, as your business and desires shall point you,— For every man hath business and desire, Such as it is;—and for my own poor part, Look you, I’ll go pray. ”

“ HORATIO.—O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
HAMLET.—And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet, Act i. Sc. 5. SHAKESPEARE.
PITY. Pity's akin to love; and every thought
Of that soft kind is welcome to my soul.
Oroonoko, Act ii. Sc. 2. T. SOUTHERNE.
My friend, I spy some pity in thy looks;
O, if thine eye be not a flatterer,
Come thou on my side, and entreat for me,
As you would beg, were you in my distress:
A begging prince what beggar pities not? ”

“ OPHELIA.
O heavenly powers, restore him!
HAMLET.
I have heard of your paintings too, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another. You jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nickname God’s creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I’ll no more on’t, it hath made me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages. Those that are married already, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they are. ”

“ What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason? How infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable? In action how like an angel? In apprehension, how like a god? The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
ROSENCRANTZ. My lord, there was no such stuff in my thoughts.
HAMLET. Why did you laugh then, when I said ‘Man delights not me’? ”

“ We tried to pass it off in external gayety and sensuous pleasure, but sad intensity lived in all of us. In me the deeper jealousy was threatening to overcome my assumed and superficial civilization. And in him I felt the strong and nervous impulse to make a radical break, to insist on a new deal which would nullify the past and open up for him and her—my Her!—a remote and faery life apart from all the world! And in her there began a self-destructive schism, an unexpressed struggle which meant for her something far more strenuous than any other situation of her life. ”

“ Yet how true a moral instinct has presided over the changed signification of the word. The calumniator and the flatterer, although they seem so opposed to one another, how closely united they really are. They grow out of the same root. The same baseness of spirit which shall lead one to speak evil of you behind your back, will lead him to fawn on you and flatter you before your face; there is a profound sense in that Italian proverb, “Who flatters me before, spatters me behind”. ”

“ To accept well marked out conceptions of morality and norms of beauty is the easier way. To try to reconstruct the basis on which our feelings express themselves is a task indeed for the gods. And since men and women are not unlimited, these idealists among them fell frequently and bit the dust of humiliation and despair. Old tradition and old instinct proved stronger than they and, filled with commonplace jealousy, a new pain was added to the old—they were not only crudely and madly jealous but they also hated themselves for being so! ”

“ ROSENCRANTZ. We think not so, my lord.
HAMLET. Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ. Why, then your ambition makes it one; ’tis too narrow for your mind.
HAMLET. O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
GUILDENSTERN. Which dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
HAMLET. A dream itself is but a shadow. ”

“ The tones were insincere, but there was passion behind them; and most often passion acts its own true character poorly, and consciously enough to make good judges think it a mere counterfeit. Hamlet, being a little mad, feigned madness. It is when I am angry that I pretend to be angry, so as to present the truth in an obvious and intelligible form. ”

“ He told me of his trip to the house that night, and of actually seeing the phantom. I have found in the past that Mr. Hatch is a cool, level-headed young man, not given to imagining things which are not there, and controls himself well. Therefore I knew that anything of charlatanism must be clever, exceedingly clever, to bring about such a condition of mind in him.
“Mr. Hatch saw, as others had seen, the figure of a phantom in the reception-room near the door of the library, or in the library near the door of the reception-room, he couldn't tell exactly. He knew it was near the door. ”

“ Economic necessity was removed to a point where we felt we could devote ourselves for a time to contemplative work—I to those psychological studies of temperament which were so fascinating to me, she to the forming of her experience into stories of human life. Dwelling as we both did in our writing on intimate nervous relations undoubtedly helped to make us more fully conscious of our own relation: and what added still farther to this awareness of our bond was my almost constant presence in the family. ”

“ Hatcher, who was not human, did not possess truly human emotions; but he did feel amazement when he was amazed, and fear when there was cause to be afraid. These specimens, obtained with so much difficulty, needed so badly, were his responsibility. He knew the issues involved much better than any of his helpers. They could only be surprised at the queer antics of the aliens with attached limbs and strange powers. Hatcher knew that this was not a freak show, but a matter of life and death. ”

“ Such pain as Hamlet's, the ferment of subverted love and reverence, may lightly bear the blame of hideous manners, seeing, they spring from no wantonness, but from the writhing of tortured and helpless Purity. Good manners may be as impossible as out of place in the presence of shameless evil. ”

“ In this astounding story of unparalleled interest, we see the sinister figure of FATE stalk deviously but relentlessly through the mystifying mazes of love, devotion, intrigue, cunning, cruelty and crime, until a conscienceless fiend, in human shape, lies prostrate in death, overwhelmed by the ruthless forces of his own creating. ”

“ HAMLET. Such an act That blurs the grace and blush of modesty, Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose From the fair forehead of an innocent love, And sets a blister there. Makes marriage vows As false as dicers’ oaths. O such a deed As from the body of contraction plucks The very soul, and sweet religion makes A rhapsody of words. Heaven’s face doth glow, Yea this solidity and compound mass, With tristful visage, as against the doom, Is thought-sick at the act. ”

“ To assume is to take to one: by assume a virtue, Hamlet does not mean pretend—but the very opposite: to pretend is to hold forth, to show; what he means is, 'Adopt a virtue'—that of abstinence—'and act upon it, order your behaviour by it, although you may not feel it. ”

“ In the meantime, as if the devil himself had plotted against me, everything is changed—even the woman herself. Fortune has been playing a game of ‘swop,’ and the woman whom I could have married meets me as my brother’s wife. ”

“ It is you who have a suspicions way, Hatty! Your imagination is fed by your determination to see everything the poor young man does en noir. His curiosity would have a small field to exercise itself upon with me. I don't receive more than one letter a month. ”

“ But the reader may urge with force that the enjoyment of this charming bit of childish pretence involves more than a perception of the unusual and the irregular. Do we not at least apprehend the fact that the hat is not merely unfitting, and grotesquely wrong, but a usurpation of the prerogative of the superior? Is not the behaviour of the child so deliciously whimsical just because we fix the mental eye on this element of make-believe? ”

“ And what eyes they were!—clear yet unfathomable, bubbling with inexhaustible laughter, yet drawing their freshness and sparkle from the central depths of thought! To a man who for twenty years had faced an eye reflecting the obvious with perfect accuracy, these escapes into the inscrutable had always been peculiarly inviting; but hitherto the Professor's mental infidelities had been restricted by an unbroken and relentless domesticity. Now, for the first time since his marriage, chance had given him six weeks to himself, and he was coming home with his lungs full of liberty. ”

“ Or hatred of things evil: rather seemed
The utterance of some world where these are not,
And the heart lives in heathen innocence
With earth's innocuous creatures. For she said:
"Love is not, as the shallow adage goes,
A witch's filter, brewed to trick the blood.
The cup we drank of on the flying deck
Was the blue vault of air, the round world's lip,
Brimmed with life's hydromel, and pressed to ours
By myriad hands of wind and sun and sea. ”