Nuisance

“ You, too, O cold of clay,
Eater of stones, may haply hear
The trumpets of that day
"When God to all his paladins
By his own splendour swore
To make a fairer face than heaven,
Of dust and nothing more." ”

“ Passion flickered, waned, and, on a pause of doubt and misgiving, tenderness dawned—tenderness, pity, remorse, regret, a growing horror and anguish, a growing knowledge of Heaven forfeited, of Hell made sure, a crescent terror, and dismay unspeakable, and under it all tenderness deepening, deepening, deepening, like a flood pressing against a barrier that it must at last break down. ”

“ Everything becomes dust; love, jewels—all becomes dust, and the sacred dust we watch over behind our webs. Become a spider like us, weave your web, and be wise.”
“But I live. I am young, I desire, I love, and I cannot bury myself in dust. ”

“ The gross of the planet's destiny
Through one more sullen gyre.
[Pg 83]
Stolidly the town flings down
Its lust by day for its nightly lust;
Who does his given stint, 't is known,
Shall have his mug and crust.—
Too base of mood, too harsh of blood,
Too stout to seize the grosser good,
Too hungry after dust!
O hark! how it blooms in the falling dark,
That flower of mystical yearning song:
Sad as a hermit thrush, as a lark
Uplifted, glad, and strong.
Heart, we have chosen the better part!
Save sacred love and sacred art
Nothing is good for long. ”

“ And we're tould, that it didn't crackle like wood does while burning, but the noise it made was like that of two unearthly voices,—one laughing bitterly, and the other shrieking and groaning as of a crature in agony. ”

“ And was it a bundle of fog in the dark drew nigh?
A bundle of rags and bones it crept to the light,—
A monstrous thing that coughed as it shuffled by,
A shape of the shapeless night,
Spawned as brown things that mimic their mothering earth,
Green creeping things that the grass lifts to the sun,
54
Out of its wrongs the City had brought to the birth
The shape of those wrongs, in one.
A woman, a woman whose lips had once been kissed,
(It was Christmas Eve, and the bells began their chime!) ”

“ May have died to dust and night
Ten, maybe, or fifteen year,
Before it shines upon my dear.
Oh! often among men below,
Heart cries out to heart, I know,
And one is dust a many years,
Child, before the other hears. ”

“ Tears started again into bitterly dry eyes, handkerchiefs were waved, people shouted, sang snatches of song—everyone made a sound of some kind, and contributed to the great unrestrained noise of human beings in distress and excitement. ”

“ Where eyes are closed divine and young, Dusked in a night no morn may break; And stilled the poet-lips that sung, In sleep no touch may wake;
While falls the venomed arrow - thrust, And lips that hate hiss foul disgrace
And the sad heart is dust, and dust The beautiful, sad face! ”

“ To picture a fair young body, that divine instrument of joy, crushed into an unsightly heap; once loved, now loathed of all men, and thrust at last, with abhorrence, into some common festering pit of abominations. ”

“ Therefore the dusky, golden softness of this man’s sensuous flame of life, that flowed oft his flesh like the flame from a candle, not baffled and gripped into incandescence by thought and spirit as her life was, seemed to her something wonderful, beyond her. ”

“ Fall you will, if you twirl yourself round.
Oh dear! what a noise:—will a noise make it well?
Will crying wash bruises away?
Suppose that it should bleed a little, and swell,
’Twill all be gone down in a day.
That’s right; be a man, love, and dry up your tears,
Come, smile, and I’ll give you a kiss;
If you live in the world but a very few years,
You must bear greater troubles than this.
[Pg 15]
A WALK TO THE MEADOWS.
We’ll go to the meadow, where cowslips do grow,
And buttercups looking as yellow as gold ”

“ When the great angry waves arise,
In long low lines against the skies,
And, with a sullen motion,
Dash themselves against the rocks,
Raising a cloud of foam, which mocks
Their sullenness—then falling, dies. ”

“ The well-known, how-often fondly-contemplated features tell the whole story in the photograph taken, as you say, a few days before the crisis. Madness is plainly lurking in that lurid eye, stamps indelibly the arch of the nostril and the curve of the lip, and in ambush along the soft curve of the cheek it lies ready to burst forth in consuming fire. ”

“ There was a feeling of horror, a kind of bristling in the darkness, and a sense of blood. They lay with their hearts in the grip of an intense anguish. The wind came through the tree fiercer and fiercer. ”

“ It soon began to get dark, a strong wind began to blow, and a voice was heard singing outside:
"Wanderer! outcast, forsaken!
Whom the night has overtaken;
If no crime your conscience stain,
Here this night you may remain." ”

“ He threw off her hand with a bitter laugh—that was like the croaking of a raven as it issued from his bone-dry throat—and in a momentary possession of hysteric madness reeled away from the woman and the shelter of the rock and delivered himself anew to the mercy of the duststorm. ”

“ Unsuspectedly from the bottom of every fountain of pleasure, as the old poet said, something bitter rises up: a touch of nausea, a falling dead of the delight, a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell, for fugitive as they may be, they bring a feeling of coming from a deeper region and often have an appalling convincingness. The buzz of life ceases at their touch as a piano-string stops sounding when the damper falls upon it. ”

“ One by one they stir. Yawns, half-stifled oaths, coughing, expectorations, noses noisily blown, whinings, cries of pain, harsh laughter, and suppressed sobbing—the hideous symphony of life at its lowest social ebb. ”

“ Here in the dust I make a heap of all my sins and vanities,—the toss of my head and the tilt of my chin, the love-looks of the lads and the black hate of the girls, and I'll burn them for a sacrifice the way the heathen would be doing and go joyful on my way with the ashes in my mouth! ”

“ If the blossoms were beans,
I should know what it means—
This blaze, which I certainly cannot endure;
It is evil, too,
For its colour is blue,
And the sense of the matter is quite obscure.
Celestial truth
Is the food of youth;
But the music was dark as a moonless night.
The facts in the song
Were all of them wrong, [Pg 35]
And there was not a single sum done right ”

“ All, all are in thy dreadful fugue, O Life,
Thy dark, malign and monstrous music, spun
In hell, from a delirious Satan's dream!***
O! dissonance primordial and supreme—
The moan, the thunder, evermore at strife,
Beneath the unheeding silence of the sun! ”

“ When the shame that has darkened her days Fantasmal at night fills the gloom, When her soul, lost in wildering ways, Flies the past, and the terror to come— When she leaps from her slumbers to hark, As if for her little one's call, It is then to the pitiless dark That her woe-burdened soul utters all: “Woe is me! ”

“ The incalculable appearance of thunder, the magic greed of fire, the malice, the spontaneity, the thresh and pulse as of life which seems to characterize whatever is capricious or impenetrable or uncontrollable are too much like the felt throbs of consciousness to become dehumanized. ”

“ How often shall the lamp of the wicked be put out, and a deluge come upon them, and He shall distribute the sorrows of His wrath? They shall be as chaff before the face of the wind, and as ashes which the whirlwind scattereth. ”

“ Everywhere he turns, Men to dust are drying, — Dust that wanders, eying (With eyes that hardly glow) New faces, dimly spying For friends that come and go. ENVOY And thus we all are nighing The truth we fear to know: Death will end our crying For friends that come and go. ”

“ When God made me out of the mud where I lay, A mortal man, feeble, heavy and vain, Eve out of me, he created us quite nude, But the spirit fully inspired us, Afterwards we were perpetually thirsty and hungry, We laboured, suffered, children were born in sorrow; For our sins, all women bear children In pain ”

“ Already a great calm was broadening down over the world, because the abomination of desolation, the usurper of divine attributes and honours, the false god and true devil, the grim, huge, hideous, overshadowing, bearded idol of a thousand centuries or more, tottered to its fall ”

“ Does not such darkness breathe through it, such melancholy, such haunting of elusive airs? There are flashes too of light, of song, the playing of shepherd's pipes, the swoop of horsemen and sudden outcries of savagery. ”

“ There shall he terrible signs in the heavens and in all the elements. These and their causes I shall explain in the first part. These signs shall be to the wicked a source of fear, anguish, and dread; but to the good a source of joy and exultation. This I shall show in the second part. Sinners! if you wish that the last day should not he a cause of dread to you, be converted! ”

“ Reckless of the rein, Deaf to the voice that fain would soothe them now, Their nostrils breathing fire, their loose manes tossed Upon the wind, and in thick clouds involved Of choking dust, round the vast circle's bound, As lightning swift they whirl and whirl again. ”

“ They now entered upon a scene of desolation not to be witnessed without deep emotion, which naturally follows wherever the melancholy consciousness arises that a vast addition has been made to the sum of human misery. ”

“ And when he is angry, his displeasure is manifested by casting dust in their eyes. They believe that, after death, they go into the stars, descending by degrees towards the horizon, and are finally received into certain green fields, abounding in fruits and flowers. ”

“ I saw the hills as distinct as if awake, and that they were all in flames. I perceived, too late, my folly ; and my tempter, with an air of insult, informed me, that all the mercy God had in reserve for me was comprised in that ring, which I had wilfully thrown away. ”

“ There seemed a tension in the air—as if something was going to snap. Doubtless you have often felt it—a sensation as though pins and needles were pricking you all over. As though you wanted to scream—to cry out—against an uncertain sensation that gripped you. ”

“ They mark time in my spirit's flawed action. I begin each day with a Damn of sorts. I end each day with a Damn of sorts. At midday sometimes it's, 'Damn the terrifying ignorance of people.' In the dusk a deep-felt Damn of the blood. ”

“ And following of wind
Through the dim avenues and deep
Abysses of the mind ;
When will our ears be deaf at last,
When will our eyes be blind ?
Oh vanity of vanities
And lighter than the air. ”

“ There are days when your very soul would seem to penetrate the grass, when, with the smell of damp earth in your nostrils, and the rhythm of blood-stirring stride underneath you, you forget everything, yourself included. ”

“ So eagerly they cling in Venus' bonds, Whilst melt away their members, overcome By violence of delight. But when at last Lust, gathered in the thews, hath spent itself, There come a brief pause in the raging heat— But then a madness just the same returns And that old fury visits them again, When once again they seek and crave to reach They know not what, all powerless to find The artifice to subjugate the bane. ”

“ His torch glowed, and she had a momentary glimpse of his face, thin, neurotic, with restless eyes, and a mouth that had the voracious look that one sees in men who are always hungry for some new sensation. ”

“ And what greater madness can there be than for the flesh, being but dust and ashes, a filthy dunghill, a swarm of worms and rottenness itself, to presume to injure the supreme Spirit of immense majesty, before whom the powers and all the other blessed spirits tremble? ”

“ Those eyes whose haunted beauty had first laid claim to one's humanity were now—their blazing madness of a short hour since dispelled—black pools of pathos in a face whose chalkiness was runneled by tears and framed in hair like tarred rope unravelled. ”

“ The vulgar imagination is quite capable of bodying forth these grimacing, horned demons, these imps with prongs and lashes, those swooping fiends, that heavy head-gear,—not unlike the English high hat in August—those fiery floods, those gibbering, wailing ghosts, those wretches immersed in ordure, those ghastly sinners munching each other, those disgustful stenches and itchings. ”

“ By dint of making a horrible noise so that the whole house shakes, changing his voice, bellowing and shrieking, ventriloquising, groaning, moaning, and whining, beating on drums, bursting forth into diabolical shrieks of laughter, and all sorts of other tricks, he persuades his companions that he is visited by the various spirits he personates, and that it is they who make the disturbance. ”

“ What were to be the first-fruits of that cataclysmic revulsion of feeling in a nature so habitually frozen from all tenderness? If no more than a shy snowdrop or two of reason, mercy, justice, pushing their way up through a savage soil, the result would be marvel enough. ”

“ The cracking of nuts was an important ceremony among the young men and maidens, who threw nuts into the fire, and from the way in which they cracked, or burned, foretold all kinds of happiness or misery for themselves. ”

“ Whether the cause be referred to mental, physical, or spiritual conditions, everyone knows the effect; every one has felt that the looks, the actions or gestures of the beloved awaken some vestige of tenderness in those most deeply sinned against and grievously wronged. ”