Levirate

“ The recollection came like a track of fire across his brain. Memory! how glorious, how terrible art thou! With the wand of the enchanter thou canst change every current of feeling into joy or woe. The same agency—nay, the same object—shall awaken the most opposite emotions. The simplest forms and the subtlest agents are alike to thee. Nature seems fashioned at thy will, and her attributes are but the instruments of thy power. ”

“ The beauty of their countenances is not only in symmetry of feature, but in a smoothness of surface, which continues without line or wrinkle to the extreme of old age, and a serene sweetness of expression, combined with that majesty which seems to come from consciousness of power and the freedom of all terror, physical or moral. ”

“ How should the reveller, issuing worn and wasted from the haunts where the violent seize joy by force to find her perish in their arms—how should such reveller, I say, break forth and sing with the sons of the morning, when the ocean of light bursts from the fountain of the east? As little canst thou, with thy mind full of petty cares, or still more petty ambitions, understand the groaning and travailing of the creation. ”

“ I was again in the whirlpool of active existence, and the world around me was deep—triple deep—in all cases of loving and hating, and plotting and gambling, of intriguing, countermining, and betraying, as very polite people would know how to do,—occupations to watch which inspire an intensity of interest unknown in any other condition of existence. ”

“ There was a fascination in this existence that made all their previous life, happy as it had been, seem tame and worthless in comparison. If real power have an irresistible charm for those who have once enjoyed its prerogatives, even the semblance and panoply of it have a marvellous fascination. ”

“ In all these changes of character, how much of the real man will be left behind? Will there be one morsel of honest flesh, when all the lacquer of paint is washed off? And was it—oh, was it for this you first adventured out on the wide ocean of life? ”

“ A vivid fancy, too, threw its glittering light over all these faculties, so that even the commonplace incidents of daily life grouped themselves dramatically in her mind, and events the least striking were made the origin of situation and sentiment, brilliant with wit and poetry. ”

“ No scene of pleasurable enjoyment can stand the contrast of such a sight; the revulsion is too sudden and too painful from the light frivolity of mirth to the terrible reality of suffering and sorrow. ”

“ The whole country had an astonishing look of vigor—of the vigor which comes with rude strength; and it had that charm which goes with all untamed beauty—the power to sting one into a sense of agitated enjoyment. ”

“ To a babbling wanderer sent;
Like her ordinary cry,
Like—but oh how different!
Hears not also mortal Life?
Hear not we, unthinking Creatures!
Slaves of Folly, Love, or Strife,
Voices of two different Natures? ”

“ This answer, which seemed to introduce something akin to levity or badinage into an examination the seriousness of which we were all beginning to realize, produced an immediate revulsion of feeling toward the man who, in face of facts revealed and to be revealed, could so lightly make use of it. ”

“ He was just opening that period of youth when the heart yearns for some object of affection—some centre around which its own hopes and fears, its wishes and aspirations, may revolve. It is wonderful how much imagination contributes in such cases, supplying graces and attractions where nature has been a niggard, and giving to the veriest commonplace character traits of distinctive charm. ”

“ These people instinctively felt the attractive power of some silent, mysterious force, some high motive, which, combined with dazzling beauty and brilliant genius, drew them to her side, without the wish or power to resist. ”

“ The words are lightly spoken by the young, who tread life's pathway with nimble feet, whose eager hands are outstretched to gather life's roses, regardless of thorns, whose voice is rippling with laughter and mirth, with blood coursing through the veins and bright eyes looking fearlessly into the future ”

“ You require a nobler goal, and a more glorious reward. He who feels in his soul that Fate has reserved for him a great and exalted part in this world’s drama may reasonably look with indifference on these paltry rehearsals of common characters. ”

“ The pure soul of the student, released a while from the tyranny of an earthly pursuit,—the drudgery of a toil, that however grand, still but ministered to human and material science,—had found for its only other element the contemplation of more solemn and eternal mysteries. ”

“ While the ear is charmed with the style, and the fancy riots on the luxuriance of description, which so intimately blend the charms of virtue and the fascinations of vice, they are not readily distinguished by all. ”

“ We survey the scene that moves around, with a gaze no longer distracted by every hope that flutters by; and it is therefore that we find ourselves more calculated than before for the graver occupations of our race. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I sat at my breakfast in the “Goat” meditating these things. The grand problem to resolve was this: Is it better to live a life of dull incidents and commonplace events in one's own actual sphere, or, creating, by force of imagination, an ideal status, to soar into a region of higher conceptions and more pictorial situations? What could existence in the first case offer me? A wearisome beaten path, with nothing to interest, nothing to stimulate me. On the other side lay glorious regions of lovely scenery, peopled with figures the most graceful and attractive. ”

“ The scene, the soft and tender influence which it possessed—the hour, soothing and elevating the mind, freed from the harassing and petty cares of existence—to a romantic and imaginative disposition these were all favourable to its effects—the development of that ethereal spirit of our nature, that enchanter whose wand conjures up the busy world within, creating all things according to his own pleasure, and investing them with every attribute at his will. ”

“ If to any of my readers I may appear here to have taken a very despondent view of this whole affair, let him only call to mind my invariable ill luck in such matters, and how always it had been my lot to see myself on the fair road to success, only up to that point at which it is certain, besides—but why explain? These are my confessions. I may not alter what are matters of fact, and my reader must only take me with all the imperfections of wrong motives and headlong impulses upon my head, or abandon me at once. ”

“ The universal outburst of unchecked curiosity demands a more refined enjoyment: reverie and fantasy alone can satisfy it; not profound and thoughtful fantasy as we find it in Shakespeare, nor impassioned and meditative reverie as we find it in Dante, but the reverie and fantasy of the eyes, ears, external senses, which in poetry as in architecture call for singularity, wonders, accepted challenges, victories gained over the rational and probable, and which are satisfied only by what is crowded and dazzling. ”

“ Apart from the great flood-tide of pleasure, down which so many float buoyantly, there is ever on these occasions a deeper current that flows beneath, of human wile and cunning and strategy, just as, in many a German fairy tale, some curious and recondite philosophy lies hid beneath the little incidents related to amuse childhood. ”

“ He was late to mature, and all his younger energies were used for what he had believed to be the world's work, but what he now perceived were the activities of a vain, ego-driven intellect, that delighted to attract the passing eye by the ring of the anvil and a great show of unsleeved muscle. ”

“ Ah this is indeed human life! where in the rushing noisy crowd, and sounds of gladness, and a thousand mingling emotions, distinctly audible to the ear of thought, are the pulsations of some melancholy string of the heart, touched by an invisible hand. ”

“ If I have occasionally given way to those erratic flights of fancy which led me to believe myself a scion of a noble house, well born and nurtured, with wealth at my command and a high station in store, all these delusions were nothing to the creative efforts of her imagination, who commenced by reminding me of a hundred people who never existed, and places and incidents which were all as unreal. ”

“ He has spent every energy of his life here, in building the vesture. That which would escape from the inert poundage has not been awakened. One of the queerest facts of all life is that these half-gods of ours must be awakened here in the flesh. ”

“ Our nature resents the closing up of the windows on its emotional and imaginative side, and revenges itself as it can. I have observed that many who deny the inspiration of Scripture hasten to redress their balance by giving a reverent credit to the revelations of inspired tables and camp-stools. In a last analysis it may be said that it is to the sense of Wonder that all literature of the Fancy and of the Imagination appeals. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Normal human emotions were re-asserting themselves—a shrinking from the ominous strangeness of this distorted world, and an aching, unreasoning, mountingly frantic desire to get back to familiar faces and scenes. ”

“ She was straight and vivid, and his pulses quickened, taking fire. Sun, air and water; sparkle, radiance and color—these things were about him filling his senses with delight and she seemed to epitomize them all in a personal incarnation. ”

“ The further our literary inquiries are extended here, the more vast and stupendous is the scene which opens to us; at the same time, that the true and false, the sublime and the puerile, wisdom and absurdity, are so intermixed, that, at every step, we have to smile at folly, while we admire and acknowledge the philosophical truth, though couched in obscure allegory and puerile fable. ”

“ The words are gravely spoken by the middle-aged, whose feet have grown a trifle weary, whose hands have gathered the roses, only to find them turned to ashes, whose laughter has more sadness than mirth, whose eyes have grown dim, whose lips tremblingly plead, "Lead, kindly light." ”

“ The perfectly ingenuous manner in which the traverser refuses to admit that she has committed any offence whatever and insists that, in default of honorable suitors, she has but dutifully, though irregularly, complied with the first and great command of nature and nature's God—increase and multiply—is undoubtedly, coarse as it is, a stroke of art, but the performance is too gross for modern scruples. ”

“ All that which is effected by a wonderful vigour of body and mind in these savages, who persist obstinately in the strangest point of honour, might be acquired in our case by training, by well-seasoned mortifications, by an overmastering joy founded on reason, by great practice in preserving a certain presence of mind in the midst of the distractions and impressions most liable to disturb it. ”

“ From the society of such characters, who seem to consider the noble productions of superior intellect, the fine and vigorous flights of fancy, the brilliant effusions of a sublime imagination, and the refined feelings of the heart, as fancied conceits or wild deliriums, those who examine them by a better standard than that of fashion or common taste, fly with delight. ”

“ The literary instinct, of almost equal disorder with dramatic instinct, and which he had come to despise during the past year, returned with the easy conformity of an undesirable acquaintance—that reportorial sentence-making faculty, strong as death, and as uncentering to the soul of man. ”

“ I like acting,—I like the applause, and the lights, and the excitement, and the illusion,—the make-belief of the whole thing: it takes me out of memory and thought; it is a world that has neither past, present, nor future, an interlude in time,-an escape from space. ”

“ Leverich or George Sutton and that chorus of onlookers was like passing through fire. One braces one’s self to withstand the pain of scenes of joy or sorrow revisited, to find that, after all, when the moment comes, there is little of that dreaded pain—it has been lived through and the climax passed in that previsioning which imagination made more intense, more harrowingly real, than the reality. ”

“ If, indeed, the realities not reflected became unrealities, were annihilated, then there would be some sense in veiling those portions of the mirror in front of which certain features of our life are exposed. ”

“ On the mere surface it is almost as good as the ‘Arabian Nights,’ and at the first flush of it you think that fancy is running riot. But when once the intention is grasped you find beneath that playful foam of seeming fun and frolic a very astonishing and deep philosophy, and the whole wild masquerade is filled with meaning. ”

“ To tell such a soul of the innocency of levity, that it need not run away from idle discourse, vain gaiety, and trifling mirth, as being the harmless relief of our heavy natures, is like telling the flame, that it need not ascend upwards. ”

“ Nothing, or less than nothing. A jest or a witticism that must be read with a commentary, or told with an explanation,—the repartee that set the table in a roar, now heard with a cold, half-contemptuous astonishment, or a vacant inquiry “if such were really the wits of those times.”
Amongst those with whose appearance I had become familiar were three young men of very fashionable exterior, who always were seen together. ”