Preterite tense

“ Anger, in my judgment, is a case in point. It is not for nothing that, by those who have divided the soul into three parts, anger has been placed below the seat of reason, and reason set in the head of man as in a citadel, anger in the heart, and desire lower still in the loins. They wished to show that reason was ever ready to repress instantly the violent outbreaks of the passions beneath her, and was empowered in some way from her lofty estate to sound the retreat. As this check was more necessary in the case of anger, it has been placed directly under reason's control.
Petrarch. ”

“ For the gloom that, surrounding, made it rare;
And God in His wisdom said:
"Of my handiwork but the human soul
Can suffer the laws of change,
That only errs from my set control,
And takes in pleasure, and pays in toll,
The whole of its passion's range.
"But who shall judge or who condemn
This work that my hands have made,
For the thread that here appears a gem,
—So have I mingled and twisted them—
Is there the gleam of a blade?
"Nor evil nor good exists for me,
As I mingle strand with strand ”

“ Where is the gentle seriousness, the delicate sensibility, the calm and sustained energy, without which true greatness cannot be? He is so cruel, too, in his descriptions; his most prized virtues are vices almost without disguise. He constantly vindicates and embellishes revenge in its grossest form; the most deadly superstition that ever infested the world. How different from the tender and solemn enthusiasm of Petrarch—or even the delicate moral sensibility of Tasso, though somewhat obscured by an assumed and artificial style. ”

“ And in the common intercourse of human life what can be more injurious than that? when you say she has involved you in toils without number, there indeed you speak truth. But what great gain is there in that? When there are such varied labours that a man is perforce obliged to engage in, what madness is it of one's own accord to go after fresh ones! As for your boasting that it is she who has made you thirst for glory, I pity your delusion, for I will prove to you that of all the burdens of your soul there is none more fatal than this. But the time for this is not yet come.
Petrarch. ”

“ With all the pity that we bestow on unfortunate love, and with all the respect that we owe to its constancy, still we cannot look but with a regret amounting to impatience on a man returning to the spot that was to rekindle his passion as recklessly as a moth to the candle, and binding himself over for life to an affection that was worse than hopeless, inasmuch as its success would bring more misery than its failure. It is said that Petrarch, if it had not been for this passion, would not have been the poet that he was. ”

“ When all these passions are extinguished, then, and not till then, will desire be full and free. For when the soul is uplifted on one side to heaven by its own nobility, and on the other dragged down to earth by the weight of the flesh and the seductions of the world, so that it both desires to rise and also to sink at one and the same time, then, drawn contrary ways, you find you arrive nowhither.
Petrarch. What, then, would you say a man must do for his soul to break the fetters of the world, and mount up perfect and entire to the realms above? ”

“ Before I quit this subject I must defend Petrarch from one accusation which is in the present day frequently brought against him. His sonnets are pronounced by a large sect of critics not to possess certain qualities which they maintain to be indispensable to sonnets, with as much confidence, and as much reason, as their prototypes of old insisted on the unities of the drama. I am an exoteric—utterly unable to explain the mysteries of this new poetical faith. I only know that it is a faith, which except a man do keep pure and undefiled, without doubt he shall be called a blockhead. ”

“ Do you not recognise at once in his words the madness and, above all, the madness of jealousy which, as one knows too well, is the ruling power in love as love is the ruling passion among all others? Perhaps you may reply: "I admit it is so, but reason will be there to temper such excess." Terence himself had anticipated your answer when he added—
"Such fickle things to settle by sane rule
Is to be sanely insane." [19]
The phrase, the truth of which you will scarcely question, puts an end, unless I am mistaken, to all those subterfuges of yours. ”

“ Petrarch. I might as well spare my blushes. For what more obvious truth than this can possibly be imagined? What man exists so ignorant or so far removed from all contact with the world as not to know that penury, grief, disgrace, illness, death, and other evils too that are reckoned among the greatest, often befall us in spite of ourselves, and never with our own consent? From which it follows that it is easy enough to know and to detest one's own misery, but not to remove it; so that if the two first steps depend on ourselves, the third is nevertheless in Fortune's hand.
S. Augustine. ”

“ She listened again—and the foreboding deepened to an amazed fear.
"They say, the Silent Ones," she went on, "that they know not whether even they have power to destroy. Energies we know nothing of entered into its shaping and are part of it; and still other energies it has gathered to itself"—she paused; a shadow of puzzlement crept into her voice "and other energies still, forces that ye do know and symbolize by certain names—hatred and pride and lust and many others which are forces real as that hidden in the Keth; and among them—fear, which weakens all those others—" Again she paused. ”

“ Among the ancients we find no trace of sentimentalism. Their masculine mood both of body and mind left no room for it, and hence the bracing quality of their literature compared with that of recent times, its tonic property, that seems almost too astringent to palates relaxed by a daintier diet. The first great example of the degenerate modern tendency was Petrarch, who may be said to have given it impulse and direction. ”

“ Petrarch. In my case there is no wound old enough for it to have been effaced and forgotten: my sufferings are all quite fresh, and if anything by chance were made better through time, Fortune has so soon redoubled her strokes that the open wound has never been perfectly healed over. I cannot, moreover, rid myself of that hate and disdain of our life which I spoke of. Oppressed with that, I cannot but be grieved and sorrowful exceedingly. That you call this grief accidie or ægritudo makes no difference; in substance we mean one and the same thing. ”

“ Hate was in his wet face, and his red gums were like round, snapping tongs.
“‘You men of the Rippling Brooks,’ he hissed, ‘your ears are far too sharp! Your happiness is all in the ripple of water—and I am here to take away that happiness. So if I 91cannot steal your brooks—why, then, I shall steal your ears! From now on, I decree that you, your wives and your children and all your neighbors shall be deaf. You shall live henceforth in a valley of silence, where not even the whir of a wren on wing shall come to your ears. ”

“ Now and then a pretender essays his awkward limbs, and reaching scarce half way even to this point, falls back clumsily amidst the hisses and laughter of the spectators; so in the world empirical pretension comes out into notoriety for a moment only to return with ridicule and scorn to its original obscurity. ”

“ Petrarch. May the Most High in His mercy save me from that misery!
S. Augustine. Though Divine Mercy may deliver a man from his folly, yet it will not excuse it. Presume not upon this mercy overmuch. For if God abhors those who lose hope, He also laughs at those who in false hope put their trust. I was sorry when I heard fall from your lips that phrase about despising what you called the old story of the philosophers on this matter. Is it, then, an old story, pray, by figures of geometry, to show how small is all the earth, and to prove it but an island of little length and width? ”

“ One would really scarce have liked to see such a job as La Comédie Humaine tackled without swagger. To think of the thing really as practicable was swagger, and of the very rarest order. So to think assuredly implied pretensions, pretensions that risked showing as monstrous should the enterprise fail to succeed. It is for the colder critic to take the trouble to make out that of the two parties to it the body of pretension remains greater than the success. ”

“ There came gibbering into it the fancy that she was the victim of a plot, that all the others had been deliberately spirited away by Miss Femm, who would lock them all up and then come creeping back to lay a toad-like witch’s hand [174] upon her. For one sickening moment she could feel that hand, but the next instant the whole fantastic web was broken. Nerves and a too eager imagination were playing her false again, playing false indeed to life itself, through which there ran the unbroken cord of sanity; they were lying and treacherous, betraying her mind back into primitive darkness. ”

“ S. Augustine. You are the victim of a terrible plague of the soul—melancholy; which the moderns call accidie, but which in old days used to be called ægritudo.
Petrarch. The very name of this complaint makes me shudder.
S. Augustine. Nor do I wonder, for you have endured its burden long enough.
Petrarch. Yes, and though in almost all other diseases which torment me there is mingled a certain false delight, in this wretched state everything is harsh, gloomy, frightful. The way to despair is for ever open, and everything goads one's miserable soul to self-destruction. ”

“ The blur of his face told her nothing, but she felt sure that he was staring across at her. It would have been less terrifying if [178] she could have seen him clearly, but that vague mass, that dark hulking shapelessness, like something monstrous spawned by the shadows, appalled her. Was he moving forward or merely swaying? And there was not a sound; nobody was coming. The whole world was suddenly empty and horrible. ”

“ Petrarch. Pray what have I done that you should desire to relieve me of the finest passions of my nature, and condemn to everlasting darkness the clearest faculties of my soul?
S. Augustine. Ah, unhappy man, have you forgotten quite this axiom of philosophy, that the climax of all evils is when a man, rooted in some false opinion, by degrees grows fatally persuaded that such and such a course is right? ”

“ The secrets of a woman's moral toilet-table may be more disconcerting than those her boudoir guarded. To be discursive about either seemed to him to lack the finer reticence of life. A man's sight, if he could see at all, was a sufficient sentry to his admiration; and the little it allowed him he might be suffered to enjoy. To label the false wherever one found it would be to leave a world only fit for fools.
Terence, however, wronged her by imagining her confidences habitual. He suggested the insecurity of entrusting such things to men.
"To men!" she exclaimed, shrinking. ”

“ One would never have suspected from his manner or appearance that, eight hours previously, he had battled with an invisible menace in the narrow confines of a darkened room, and had felt stark terror grip his soul before he emerged triumphant from the most harrowing experience of his adventurous career. No one would ever have suspected that, because, to all outward appearance, Peret was at peace with the world and had no thought on his mind of greater weight than the aroma of the cigarette between his lips. ”

“ Petrarch. I have long ago set such a goal to my desires, and, unless I am mistaken, a very modest one; but in the pushing and shameless manners of my time, what place is left for modesty, which men now call slackness or sloth?
S. Augustine. Can your peace of mind be disturbed by the opinion of the crowd, whose judgment is never true, who never call anything by its right name? But unless my recollection is at fault, you used to look down on their opinion. ”

“ A consumptive friend of hers, rendered nervous and weak by long sickness, upon being asked one morning, as usual, about her health, replied: "Don't ask me again—I feel as if I could throw this chair at you." Now I do not think, said Mrs. Prentiss, that this speech was a sin in the sight of God. He saw in it nothing but the poor invalid's irritable nerves, God judges us according to the thoughts and intentions of the heart; and we ought, as far as possible, to judge each other in the same way. And when we ourselves are the ones really at fault, we ought to confess it. ”

“ Overwhelmed with too many divers impressions made on it, and everlastingly fighting with its own cares, your weak spirit is crushed so that it has not strength to judge what it should first attack or to discern what to cherish, what to destroy, what to repel; all its strength and what time the niggard hand of Fate allows are not sufficient for so many demands. So it suffers that same evil which befalls those who sow too many seeds in one small space of ground. ”

“ Petrarch. I have often noticed that reference, and wondered that of the passions he should call this the most violent of all.
S. Augustine. Your surprise would have vanished if you had not lost your powers of memory. But I must recall you by a short admonition to a recollection of its many evils. Think what you were when that plague seized upon your soul; how suddenly you fell to bemoaning, and came to such a pitch of wretchedness that you felt a morbid pleasure in feeding on tears and sighs. ”