Revetment

“ The point is that our will, in flowing outwards, at its capricious pleasure, met with opposition—met with resistance. We do not really recover our self-esteem until every memory of such an event has been obliterated by a complete revenge. ”

“ Yet, upon my soul, I wonder what they see in me to treat me so! Measures, not men, have always been my mark; and I vow, by all that's honourable, my resentment has never done the men, as mere men, any manner of harm—that is, as mere men. ”

“ I am, also, supported by the retrospect of my conduct; with all its mistakes, and all its extravagances, it has been that of a virtuous, ingenuous, uncorrupted, mind. You have contemned a heart of no common value, you have sported with its exquisite sensibilities—but it will, still, know how to separate your virtues from your errors. ”

“ Thus in a word, to avoid a long detail, those suspicious attachments, loose conversations, ridiculous compliances, and desires of pleasing, too much attended, have filled you with dispositions so nearly allied to guilt and debauchery, that you are no longer capable of resistance against any of their attacks; the corruption prepared by the whole train of your past actions, will be lighted up in an instant; your weakness will overcome your reflection; your heart will go against glory, duty, and yourself. ”

“ But ever since we became an Editor, our repose, bodily and mental, has been like that of a Hindoo god. Often do we sit whole winter nights, leaning back on our chair, more like the image of a man than a man himself, with shut eyes, that keep seeing in succession all the things that ever happened to us, and all the persons that we ever loved, hated, or despised, embraced, beat, or insulted, since we were a little boy. ”

“ When respect towards others and the giving of reverence where reverence is due are abandoned, Virtue is abandoned. When modesty, gravity, and dignity are eliminated from speech and behavior, Truth is lost, yea, even its entrance gate is hidden away and forgotten. ”

“ Here at present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking “nature” into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. ”

“ To-day, when all reverence has vanished, even before kings and gods, when to respect oneself overmuch is regarded with undisguised resentment, what can we hope from a quarter in which self-reverence and reverence in general are the first needs of all? ”

“ But, after all, I have found it a hard task and sore test of my courage for the last five weeks to go on daily bolting the egotism, selfishness, and sordid meanness of my sick world, and at night writing till one or two or three o’clock every imaginable kind of nonsense, with a heavy heart and an aching head—for means, ay, for means,—only to continue the same dull drudgery somewhat longer. ”

“ A RULE OF LIFE
‘If you want to annoy an opponent thoroughly, and even to harm him,’ said a crafty old knave to me, ‘you reproach him with the very defect or vice you are conscious of in yourself. Be indignant ... and reproach him!
‘To begin with, it will set others thinking you have not that vice.
‘In the second place, your indignation may well be sincere.... You can turn to account the pricks of your own conscience. ”

“ He knew that the mind which even best repels temptation first urged hath seldom power to resist the same suggestion, if daily—dropping, unwearying—presenting itself in every form, obtruded in every hour, losing its horror by custom, and finding in the rebellious bosom itself its smoothest vizard and most alluring excuse. ”

“ They worked amongst giant mechanisms beside which they were puny, but theirs was a life of force and strength which took from them the fear of anything that was merely human. Thus surprise changed to resentment, and resentment began to resolve itself into a slow and consuming anger. ”

“ Who better than myself can speak of their glorious courage, their patient resignation, their noble self-devotion? Has not the man, sinking under fever, crawled from his bed to lead me to the house of another deeper in misery than himself? ”

“ You have now added the last negative to your character, and meanly confessed that you are destitute of the common spirit of a man. Retire, then, my Lord, and hide your blushes from the world; for, with such a load of shame, even black may change its colour. A mind, such as yours, in the solitary hours of domestic enjoyment, may still find topics of consolation. ”

“ But where reverence is, there is fear; for he who has a feeling of reverence and shame about the commission of any action, fears and is afraid of an ill reputation. ”

“ We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and, when got, the repose is insupportable; for we think either of the troubles we have, or of those that threaten us; and even if we felt safe on every side, ennui would of its own accord spring up from the depths of the heart where it is rooted by nature, and would fill the mind with its venom. ”

“ At the best one encounters a sort of revolt. This feeling of revolt, I suffered, in varying degrees of intensity, at the hands of almost every one who came near me; it would seem that nothing inflicts a deeper wound than suddenly to make one's distance felt. ”

“ Why should a stern, condemning voice declare in recesses of my soul, 'You could and should resist'? For years I have been daily yielding to temptation, and conscience as often pronounces sentence against me. ”

“ To one who is imperfect, unstable, passionate, and revengeful? To a being who has, in fact, no uniformity of conduct, no system of action, and no immutability of procedure? No! Those who place their confidence here must be wretchedly disappointed, and an agitated mind will be their unavoidable portion. ”

“ You are now exposed to some temptations which will probably never again attack you with so much force as now, and against which we call upon you to struggle with all your might. Perhaps the worst and strongest of these is the temptation to rest from your labours, satisfied with what you have already done. ”

“ Where the mind is absorbed in some one object of reform, this constant devotion to duty is almost, if not quite, impossible. The mind becomes so warped in one direction that it loses the habit, and almost loses the power, of turning in any other. Hence we rarely hear the word duty from the lips of the reformer. ”

“ Ahead of her loomed, only dimly discerned as yet, the ordeal of strenuous monotony; the deadly-dull, prolonged grind wherein endurance, as it hardens, is subjected to a constantly harsher strain, until the soul revolts as, in the earlier stage, the body had rebelled. ”

“ Reverence, etc.--As for reverence, consideration for others, respect for persons and property, I can only urge the importance of a sedulous cultivation of these moral qualities--the distinguishing marks of a refined nature--until they become the daily habits of the child's life; and the more, because a self assertive, aggressive, self seeking temper is but too characteristic of the times we live in. ”

“ Thus is human nature formed to compliance, yielding submission of temper. We find the principles of it within us, and every one exercises it towards some objects or other, i.e., feels it with regard to some persons, and some circumstances. Now, this is an excellent foundation of a reasonable and religious resignation. ”

“ But to many of the rank and file—working up to and a little beyond their strength—with whom swelled wrists and other protests of nature are becoming apparent, it is a relief. They are glad of the respite. ”

“ Let us hope that the refinement, falsely so called, which is only another name for vanity, laziness, and selfishness, may soon give way to the true refinement of heart and mind which considers nothing too menial which will benefit others; nothing too common that will add to the happiness of our fellow-creatures. ”

“ Without these moments of rest the conditions of life at present and the constitutions for which the new word "nervy" has had to be invented, will give us tempers and temperaments incapable of repose and solitude. ”

“ If you get hit soon after you've done wrong, you think it's retribution, and if it holds off till you've forgotten all about it, you think it's a strange Providence, and you puzzle over it, but you don't reform. ”

“ It is either the disease of weakness, or of unbalanced self-will, or the disease of inherited taint. We have fought against this conclusion because we still harbour the spirit of revenge; but as knowledge advances we shall, we must, accept it. ”

“ I have been too much accustomed to self-indulgence, to bear restraint, and should it ever be imposed by a master's hand, my rebellious spirit would break the bonds of duty, and assert its independence. ”

“ The nerve-pangs of irritability and impatience, of well-nigh uncontrollable rebellion and revolt—all concealed with difficulty, but not thereby conquered—seared her spirit far more deeply than her left forefinger was pricked and torn by the needle driven at unaccustomed speed. ”

“ This new life will betake itself along the line of least resistance—or should we not rather say, the least resistances, as a "compromise with all the necessities," in a just balancing of pleasure and unpleasure? ”

“ Even in the first moments of angry surprise and revolt, that sense is quickened; we rebel, not against an inanimate world or an impersonal law, but against a Living and Personal Being, whom we acknowledge as the Arbiter of our destinies, and whose wisdom and love and power we affect for the time to question, but cannot really gainsay. The whole of our experience tends to this end—to the continual rousing of our spiritual consciousness. ”

“ They are all men of resentment, are these physiological distortions and worm-riddled objects, a whole quivering kingdom of burrowing revenge, indefatigable and insatiable in its outbursts against the happy, and equally so in disguises for revenge, in pretexts for revenge: when will they really reach their final, fondest, most sublime triumph of revenge? ”

“ When you revolt, why revolt—climb, hike, get out, defy—tell everybody and everything to go to hades! That disposes of the case. You thus separate yourself entirely from those you have served—no one misunderstands you—you have declared yourself. ”

“ Therefore, as might be expected of those men who err in matters of the greatest concern, we transform our natural confidence into boldness, desperateness, recklessness, shamelessness, while our natural caution and self-respect we transform into cowardice and abjectness, full of fears and perturbations. ”

“ If they can get any body to put in their place, they may get out o' the bargain; for they can, of a sartainty, give oceans o' money to people, but can't take any themselves, plase your Reverence. But sure, where's the use o' me to be tellin' your Reverence what you know betther nor myself?—an' why shouldn't you, or any one that has the power you have? ”

“ What have been here brought together are chiefly cases of self-devotion that stand out remarkably, either from their hopelessness, their courage, or their patience, varying with the character of their age ”

“ In this way it is that the whole of life is spent. Repose is sought by the mastery of obstacles; and when these are mastered, the repose becomes oppressive. The mind then fall back upon the ills which are actually felt, or those which are threatened. And if immunity from all these were really experienced, ennui would force its secret entrances into the spirit, and pervade and envenom it in every part. ”

“ And then, quite suddenly, there swept over him the fierce, insistent longing for change which wrestles with every man at some time or other in his life; the hot desire to fling himself out of the rut into which that life inevitably must settle, to encounter anything, good or bad, so long as it brought a change. ”

“ How many fall from Affluence to Want, from Splendor to a Goal, thro’ the Inveteracy of Revenge! Not all the Concessions of the opposite Party, not all the Tears of his Wife, nor the impending Ruin of his Children, can appease the Revengeful: Savage-like, he quits not his Hold till his Fury is glutted, till his Adversary is destroyed. Besides these, there are many other Species of Revenge, less obvious indeed, but perhaps not less criminal: there are Men whose Fury is less, but whose Malice is equal: Men with cooler Heads, but with inveterate Hearts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is only at intervals that the clamour on the subject is loud and vehement. But it seems to us that, during the remissions, the feeling gathers strength, and that every successive burst is more violent than that which preceded it. ”

“ If one could vest the abstract with personal feelings, what an ample revenge would be hers at the sight of the renegade—sick-hearted, weary, and shamefaced—coming back to the ways of his youth and race, and succumbing to some one part of that which he had despised and rejected in toto! ”

“ Why, then, O men, do you weep, why do you sigh, when perchance you have to bear with injurious words? Think diligently what opposition I suffered from sinners against myself, that you may not be wearied, and grow fainthearted. ”