Lame

“ The whorish and adulterous eye will then be put out in utter darkness. The tongue, that was used to cursing, swearing, and filthy talking, will then be scorched with tormenting flames, and be denied a drop of water to cool its intolerable heat. ”

“ But now I find a great many who have advanced to a slang beyond that of verbal expressions,—a slang of mind, a slang of sentiment, a slang in which very little seems left of the woman and nothing at all of the lady.
Newspaper essayists assert that the young men of the day are to blame for this; that the young men like it; and the fair husband-anglers dress their flies in the colours most likely to attract a nibble. ”

“ To such, groans, and sighs, and lamentations must be not only audible to exist at all, but audible in a dramatic and striking form with men, in order to be groans, and sighs, and lamentations acceptable with God. ”

“ It is certainly true that the same emotional temperament, dissolving in tears at the spectacle of the country’s woes, and expressing itself to a great extent in the same or similar language, is noticeable in the author (s) of Lamentations i.-iv. and in Jeremiah. And both refer these woes to the same cause, viz. the sins of the nation, and particularly of its prophets and priests. ”

“ Holes are dug beneath, into which the melted fat drops, and when the body is half burnt, the relations come and make great lamentations, drinking their wine, and reciting their songs of praise to{65} their gods according to their custom, and as they have been taught by their elders. ”

“ Old Nassau will never be what she was before the fire of '55. Those precious heirlooms of our day are sunk from sight forever, dear and mossy as they were,—swept down, like cobwebs, before the flame-besom. ”

“ The leaping of the flame from side to side, the capricious ignition far and near, and rapid race of the yellow darting flames, the roar of the fire in the woods, the kindling of great trees as if they were torches, and the flare-up of small ones, shrivelled, burnt, and gone in a minute, and the lowering smoke, which seems to make the wood a burning prison—all these are enough to make the stoutest heart stand still. But the prairie-fire is worse, from its overwhelming speed, which paralyses the imagination, and delays or precludes all rational attempts to escape. ”

“ The outline of fire, which before was firm and motionless, now wavers and shakes as if it would pass away, as the wind blows the flames back and forth from the great cups by which it is lighted. From near and far the world looks on,—from the Piazza beneath, where carriages drive to and fro in its splendor, and the band plays and the bells toll,—from the windows and loggias of the city, wherever a view can be caught of this superb spectacle,—and from the Campagna and mountain towns, where, far away, alone and towering above everything, the dome is seen to blaze. ”

“ It is a spectacle that ought to make the imps of netherdom tremble for their laurels—man, the remorseless glutton, going about with a tongue and a knife, with his tongue preaching peace, mercy, and love, and with his knife making the very earth sodden with blood. ”

“ And every lass would straine
To please him in her sonnet:
The pride of al the youth he was,
The glory of the grove,
The pleasure of each tender lass,
The theame of all their love.
But oh! unlucky fate!
A curse upon ambition! ”

“ What man would belíeve the witnessing voices of the whole world if she once whispered them false? And she pays him, too, with love-words, with the sweetness of her lips, with the touch of hair on his cheek;—ah, God! ”

“ Pathetic accents suit a melancholy countenance; words full of menace, an angry one; wanton expressions, a sportive look; and serious matter, an austere one. For nature forms us first within to every modification of circumstances; she delights or impels us to anger, or depresses us to the earth and afflicts us with heavy sorrow: then expresses those emotions of the mind by the tongue, its interpreter. ”

“ If you can also chop up any real Paschal lamb of innocence in very fine pieces, so that it is minced and hashed and unrecognisable for ever, serve the mince with the vinegar of malignity, and the fresh mint of novelty, and you will be the very Carême of gossip henceforward. ”

“ No; in that noble face, pale from illness or from sadness, with the traces of sorrow upon it, and the marks of long vigils by the bedside of her father—in that refined face, whose expression spoke only of elevation of soul, and exhibited the perfect type of manly beauty, there was certainly nothing that could excite repugnance, but every thing that might inspire confidence. ”

“ I have employed a certain familiar style of language to express the actual way in which people talk with each other, whom education and a certain refinement of sentiment have placed above the use of vulgar idioms. I use the word vulgar in its most extensive sense; the vulgarity of rank and fashion is as gross in its way, as that of poverty, and its cant terms equally expressive of base conceptions, and therefore equally unfit for poetry. ”

“ Be careful too, or you may meet some one—perhaps a man, perhaps a woman—as nature divides the sexes; as the rum seller combines them, both beasts, who in their drunken frenzy may thrust you, for the very hatred of your better clothes, or the fear that you have come to rescue them from their crazy loved dens of death, down, headlong down, those filthy stairs. ”

“ We get no pleasure from them except that of hearty anger and strong contrast. Their hot, raw, garish colour—the chalky dry skin of his women—the grinning leathern faces of his men—and the entire absence of toning—are as offensive to our eyesight as the heartlessness, the grimace, the want of all naturalness in expression or feeling, in his human beings, are to our moral taste. ”

“ The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments--and even in love. The manner in which, as in the features and character of a human face, the inner truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to look at their kind. ”

“ With my soul and my folk I will ransom him, whom my bedfellow still I see Each night and whose scent is pleasanter than the scent of musk to me!”
Quoth I, “If [the speaker] have beauty after the measure [of the goodliness] of this [her speech] the thing is every way complete.” ”

“ To take a single instance: we speak of a man in English social relations 'breaking the ice.' If this were expanded into a sonnet, we should have before us a dark and sublime picture of an ocean of everlasting ice, the sombre and baffling mirror of the Northern nature, over which men walked and danced and skated easily, but under which the living waters roared and toiled fathoms below. The world of slang is a kind of topsy-turveydom of poetry, full of blue moons and white elephants, of men losing their heads, and men whose tongues run away with them--a whole chaos of fairy tales. ”

“ If aught unto the sight brief pleasure gives, 'T is but to snare the soul with treacherous lime. So, wouldst thou keep thy spirit free from cloud, A tranquil habit to thy latest day, Follow the few, and not the vulgar crowd. ”

“ It was only that they had found words too blundering a vehicle to express emotions so strong and complex. But where the tongue fails, the glance of the eye and the pressure of a hand says in a moment what many words only darken and confuse. ”

“ What a miserable instrumentality is language! A tone of satiny flesh, a luminous shadow on a bare shoulder, a flickering light on floating silk, attract, recall, and retain the eye for a long time, and yet there is but a vague phrase with which to express the charm.... ”

“ Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the Beggar's robes, and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public. He is never out of the fashion, or limpeth awkwardly behind it. ”

“ I will listen to the false lips that speak the words of innocence, while deep dishonour lurks in the candid smile,—a smile that seemed to me as that of an angel. Yet 'tis an appalling spectacle to watch the words, the looks, of one who, breathing only the sentiments of a chaste wife and mother, is about to sully your name with one of those deep, deadly stains which can only be washed out in blood. ”

“ I cannot convey to you any idea of the poverty of language that is felt when one attempts to describe such a combination of grand and uncommon objects, among which is found every thing essential to constitute the romantic, the terrific, the picturesque, and the sublime. ”

“ For almost the first time in his life he grew melancholy; his hands fell on his lap; he sat gazing out of the window-slit upon the view outside—the view he had looked at every day of his life, and might look at for endless days more. ”

“ To whom all things were barter—slaves, spices, gold, and gum;
Who gave his life for glory; who sold his soul for rum—
I sing him, and I see him, as only those can see
Who stake their lives to fathom that solveless mystery ”

“ One, we say, is cunning, another is open and ingenuous, a third is vain, a fourth cruel, a fifth is refined and gentle, and a sixth is sensual and gross. These expressions have been developed on the face, by the exercise and indulgence through life of the several qualities of cunning, of frankness, of vanity, of cruelty, of refinement, or of sensuality. ”

“ Now, most of us crawl home to decease respectably of "a surfeit of lampreys." We keep the names, however, of those who seem to make their exit to the sound of spiritual trumpets, and who fling our to-morrow's innocent gauds away, to clothe themselves with inexhaustible felicity. ”

“ There yet remain several distinct divisions of Slang to be examined;—the Slang of the stable, or jockey Slang; the Slang of the prize ring; the Slang of servitude, or flunkeydom; vulgar, or street Slang; the Slang of softened oaths; and the Slang of intoxication. I shall only examine the last two. If society, as has been remarked, is a sham, from the vulgar foundation of commonalty to the crowning summit of royalty, especially do we perceive the justness of the remark in the Slang makeshifts for oaths, and sham exclamations for passion and temper. ”

“ You mistake your heart if you think you can write a lampoon. Your whips are rods of roses. Your spleen has ever had for its objects vices, not the vicious-abstract offences, not the concrete sinner. But you are sensitive, and wince as much at the consciousness of having committed a compliment, as another man would at the perpetration of an affront. ”

“ But it is her mouth—at once her betrayer and her chief charm—that one loves. In among its many curves lies all her wickedness,—the beautiful mouth, so full of mockery, laughter, fun, a certain decision, and tenderness unspeakable. ”

“ Rude and rough power lies in its sound. The monosyllabic verbs which it commences show well what its original effect was felt to be. Race, rage, rack, rail, rain, rake, ramp, range, rant, rate, rave, rash, raze—all these words have an affinity of meaning, derived from the ra, though modified by the endings. ”

“ The romancers who have attempted to describe their habits of life and delineate their characters, catching this last idea, and imagining things probable of the country they were in, have drawn the one in lines the most grotesque and absurd, and colored the other with a pencil dipped in all hues but the right. ”

“ Each little verse is an acclamation, which breaks forth like a growl; their strong breasts heave with a groan of anger or enthusiasm, and a vehement or indistinct phrase or expression rises suddenly, almost in spite of them, to their lips. ”

“ Certainly we all must have presented a perfect picture of woe and misery—half-frozen and famished—pale, haggard, shivering, with our beards unshaven, and our hair hanging lank and wet over our faces, our lips blue, our eyes bloodshot, our clothes dripping with moisture. ”

“ Such desire is often aroused in the most well-constituted temperaments among us, and in this case it might be said that the sound physical nerves of the daughter of the Romers craved the satisfaction of such an impulse with the same stolid persistence as her flesh and blood craved for air and sun. ”

“ With the ease which long acquaintance with the world alone gives, she spoke on all topics, lightly, brilliantly, the languor or the satire of one moment changed the next to the poetry or the earnestness which seemed to lie full as much in her nature ”

“ Tell us where you’ll be in future, utter
boldly, commit yourself, trust to the light.
Do the milk-white girls hold you now?
If your tongue’s stuck in your mouth,
you’ll banish all the rewards of love. ”

“ All elegance of mind and manners is banished. A theatrical, bombastic, windy phraseology of heroic virtue, blended and mingled up with a worse dissoluteness, and joined to a murderous and savage ferocity, forms the tone and idiom of their language and their manners. ”

“ Popular expressions in the language of civilised peoples, such as to have one's heart in one's mouth, or the soul on the lips or in the nose, show how natural is the idea that the life or soul may escape by the mouth or nostrils. ”

“ That were the most dreadful thing that could happen to me. Oh, it is very beautiful,’ he said. ‘It has my gracious approval.’ And then he nodded pleasantly, and examined the empty loom, for he would not say that he could see nothing. ”

“ In common speech, sometimes it is the words of the poet that are called expressions, the notes of the musician, or the figures of the painter; sometimes the blush which generally accompanies the feeling of shame, the pallor often due to fear, the grinding of the teeth proper to violent anger, the shining of the eyes and certain movements of the muscles of the mouth, which manifest cheerfulness. ”

“ At present it is enough to ask whether human love and hatred, joy and sorrow, homage and scorn can manifest themselves by looks and tones, by the open palm and the clenched fist, by laughter and tears, by a bent neck and by a curled lip. ”