Spoil

“ "I keep turning over new leaves, and spoiling them, as I used to spoil my copybooks, and I make so many beginnings there never will be an end," he said dolefully. ”

“ But the women and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself, and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies which the Lord thy God hath given thee. ”

“ In interval, on the other hand (from ‘intervallum’, the space between two palisades) , excel, premium, salary, and many other words we have examples of metaphors taken from the military life. The English-sounding word, spoil, comes to us from a Latin term which once had no other meaning than to ‘strip a conquered foe of his arms’. By entering with our imaginations into the biography of such a word, as it lives in time, we catch glimpses of civilization in primitive Rome. ”

“ The past Hours weak and gray,
With the spoil which their toil
Raked together
From the conquest but One could foil. ”

“ The spoil is shown with great circumstantiality;{93} female captives, holding children by the hand and infants at the breast, advance on foot or are borne upon carts, and all manner of utensils and provisions are carried upon beasts of burden and drays. ”

“ In dread of spoiling all by over-rashness, he waits, perhaps for years, till he makes sure that the stone is the right one by seeing it with his own eyes, and learns the secret of the spring by which the chalice is opened. ”

“ They deliver their spoils to their servants, all besmeared with blood, to be carried before them in triumph, they themselves in the meantime singing the triumphant paean. And as the chief of their spoils, they fasten those they have killed, over the doors of their houses, as if they were so many wild beasts taken in hunting. ”

“ On the Death of the Lady's Brother and Sister, and a Child of the name of Avis, aged one year.
⁠On Death's domain intent I fix my eyes,
Where human nature in vast ruin lies:
With pensive mind I search the drear abode,
Where the dread conquerer has his spoils bestowed ”

“ Woe unto us! for the day goeth away, for the shadows of the
evening are stretched out.
24:006:005 Arise, and let us go by night, and let us destroy her palaces.
24:006:006 For thus hath the LORD of hosts said, Hew ye down trees, and
cast a mount against Jerusalem: this is the city to be
visited; she is wholly oppression in the midst of her.
24:006:007 As a fountain casteth out her waters, so she casteth out her
wickedness: violence and spoil is heard in her; before me
continually is grief and wounds.
24:006:008 Be thou instructed, O Jerusalem, lest my soul depart from thee ”

“ Let me write down the things I am about to write down, and let them be taken, as they will be taken, for the last ravings of a madman. The city will be in mourning for the thing I shall have done—but its mourning will be of no consequence beside that other fate from which I shall have saved it.
I have always had a taste for nocturnal prowling. ”

“ Paler than the dead who lay so still in their quiet rest in the churchyard; colder than the very touch of death itself; rigid as the body when the breath has gone forever; there he stood, the epitome of awful fear. With eyeballs starting from their sockets, open mouth, dilated nostrils, he seemed the very personification of incredulous horror. ”

“ In her bitter anguish passed,
O'er the blossoms white and lowly,
Was her sacred shadow cast;
And the agony of sorrow,
Falling like a purple pall.—
Unforgotten with the morrow—
Still doth linger over all. ”

“ Oh, the footfalls! the footfalls! Each tread marks a good or a wicked thought. A fiend or an angel starts beneath every heel. They write an eternal [255] record as they go. Their voices float forever to witness against or for us. We people space as we cleave it. The ground that is dumb as we spurn it has a memory and a revenge. I am more sensitive than my kind; and my penance to these monitors of my sin is but a realization of the terror which all must feel at the accusation of their footfalls. ”

“ Through the magnifying power of this floating medium, the image may be fashioned into all the fancied forms of poetical creation.
At the midnight hour, by a blue taper light, and in a ruined castle, a simple tale will become a romance of terror. ”

“ At first, I used to wake with the heavy weight of sorrow upon me, morning after morning, and sit apart, pale and sad, with the tears starting at the slightest word—and was no doubt an object of wonder to my merry, boisterous cousins, who looked on me from wide open eyes, with wondering glances, scarcely ever approaching me or speaking to me. ”

“ Blood and soul, in a flood ample as the way made for them, follow the withdrawing blade,—l’ anima purcina, the spirit of pork; the blood into a hogshead, promising black puddings; the soul, either into the passing winds, or, as others think, into the body of some greedy chuff of a millionaire, that vilest and most repulsive of muck-worms. ”

“ But I light a spirit-lamp, and make some coffee, and he open the dead man’s book—it is what they call a diary—and begin to read. All at once I hear a cry, and I see him drop the book on the ground, and go to the dead man, and jerk his fist as if to strike him in the face. ”

“ We can now understand why among many peoples of antiquity, as Plutarch tells us, the time of sowing was a time of sorrow. The laying of the seed in the earth was a burial of the divine element, and it was fitting that like a human burial it should be performed with gravity and the semblance, if not the reality, of sorrow. ”

“ In the testamented terror
Of the lengthened scroll he reads;
While the beggar at the highroad
Vainly pleads!
Comes a wanton in her madness,
Drifting down the human stream;
In her eyes the haunting horror
Of a dream! ”

“ Passing sorrows blaspheme and accuse heaven; great sorrows neither accuse nor blaspheme—they listen.
In the morning I passed entire hours in the contemplation of nature. My windows overlooked a valley, in the midst of which arose a village steeple; all was plain and calm. Spring, with its budding leaves and flowers, did not produce on me the sinister effect of which the poets speak, who find in the contrasts of life the mockery of death. ”

“ As long as the stones of Stirling or of Blois shall hold together, that horror shall be their dower. The walls shriek their tale. They make a splendid and harmonious background for the tragedy that gives them life. ”

“ A tree casts a shadow, a house casts a shadow, a needle casts a shadow, even a hair—where the shadow is, there is some substance to fling it; where great blame is cast, there is some occasion for it. You may have stood on a rock, and seen your shadow thrown all down a valley and up the side of an opposite hill, an enormous figure, and a ridiculous caricature of yourself. So the blame cast on you is often excessive and altogether unreasonable and monstrous. ”

“ Doth the ploughman plough all day for a little bit of oats or barley, and will not you plough all day for souls that shall live for ever, if saved, to adore the grace of God, or shall live for ever, if unsaved, in outer darkness and woe? Oh, by the terrors of the wrath to come and the glory that is to be revealed, gird up your loins, and plough all day. ”

“ Murders, death in all its guises, the reduction and sacking of cities, all must be to us just such a spectacle as the changing scenes of a play; all is but the varied incident of a plot, costume on and off, acted grief and lament. ”

“ But the dead branch spoke from the sod,
And the eggs answered me again:
Because we failed dost thou complain?
Is thy wrath just? And what if God,
Who waiteth for thy fruits in vain,
Should also take the rod? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Some day I shall write a novel on that theme, and call it "The Pulley." In this tragic, restless world there must be some place where at last we can lay our heads and be at rest. Some people call it death. ”

“ If it should be the fate of any of you to count the moments of captivity, in sorrow and in pain, pining in a dungeon's damps, may you find refuge in the recollection of the example you this day set to those who may be called to pass judgment on your lives! ”

“ Thus go the fairy kind, Whither Fate driveth; not as we Who fight with it, and deem us free Therefore, and after pine, or strain Against our prison bars in vain; For to them Fate is Lord of Life And Death, and idle is a strife With such a master ... ”

“ Alas! thy latest voyage draws near a close,
For Death broods voiceless in the darkening sky;
Subsides the breeze; the untroubled waves repose;
The scene is peaceful all. Can Death be nigh,
When thus, mute and unarm'd, his vassals lie?
Mark ye that cloud! There toils the imprisoned gale ”

“ For every step a man lies dead,
A cottage hearth is cold.
Take up the babes with mailed hands,
Transfix them with thy spears,
Spare not the chaste young virgin-bands,
Tho' blood may be their tears.
Beat down the corn, tear up the vine,
The waters turn to blood ”

“ Lord, I submit myself to Thee and eke to Fate, Content, if so Thou please, to suffer and to wait.
My enemies oppress and torture me full sore: But Paradise at last, belike, shall compensate.
Though Fate press hard on me, I trust in the Elect, [1] The Accepted One of God, to be my advocate.
With this the King turned to him and said, ‘O youth, after having rid me of one trouble, thou addest another to me: but tell me, where is thy wife and where is the wounded slave?’ ‘The slave lies in the tomb under the dome,’ answered the youth, ‘and she is in the chamber over against the gate. ”

“ It stood in a dusky corner by the dead forge. Not so much light as would certainly guide a hand was allowed to fall upon it; for deeds of darkness, to be successful, must be prepared against darkness. ”

“ It is mournful to remember that we have seen this ploughing continue till the sun has touched the horizon and the night dews have begun to fall. Even then the long-suffering God has followed up his work—ploughing, ploughing, ploughing, ploughing, till darkness ended all. Do I address any aged ones whose lease must soon run out? ”

“ If you look at your own image in the shining surface of a teapot, or the back of a silver spoon, all things therein appear grotesquely distorted, and all distances strangely altered. But if you choose to make the bizarre supposition that this spoon-world is real, and your image—the spoon-man—a thinking and speaking being, certain interesting facts could be developed by a discussion between yourself and him. ”

“ In these pantheistic sympathies I dimly recall that another sect finds three great mysteries in its esoteric view of the world. The wind whistling through the trees, the river breaking over its rocks, the movements of man and his voice,—or, indeed, his silence,—are the expression of the great mysteries of body, of word, and of thought. ”

“ Not only have there been catastrophes so alarming that the blood chills at their remembrance, but column after column of the paper has been devoted to calamities of a minor degree of horror, but which, when added together, are enough to astound the mind with the fearful amount of sudden death which has of late fallen on the sons of men. ”

“ Heads, hands, legs, and arms mangled and dripping with blood,—human blood! There were moans, low murmurings, wrenched from the men against their wills. Men were babbling, in their delirium, of other scenes,—dim recollections, which were momentary realities. ”

“ Is there not a constant repetition going on of the story of the fable where the storm, blow as it will, cannot tear the cloak from the shoulders of the traveler, while the first warm rays of sunshine make him throw it off immediately? ”

“ In hell—in Sheol, which may be understood of the depth of the earth, the very centre of it. Should we dig as deep as we can under ground, and think to hide ourselves there, we should be mistaken; God knows that path which the vulture's eye never saw, and to him the earth is all surface. ”

“ The abuse increased, while the dead man, stretched on his back, gazed motionless with his large fixed eyes at the immense sky from which the night was falling. This earth heaped in his mouth was the bread which he had refused to give. ”

“ That hoary house might have been a gateway of the dim land we call the Past, looking down in stony sorrow on the follies of those who so soon must cross its portals, and, to the wise who could hear the lesson, pregnant with echoes of the warning voices of many generations. ”

“ Thus between these hollow receptacles prepared for the dead, and death itself, the woman walked, the moonlight revealing the suggestive horror on one hand, while a dense 38shadow and a thick wall of stone shut out the real horror close by. ”

“ The plague of boils on man, the deadly murrain amongst cattle, the bloody spectacles of the Flagellants—all were on the side of free thought and the free expression of thought, for all encouraged counsels of perfection. ”

“ A silence has fallen upon the house more melancholy than the loudest expression of grief. The servants are conversing over their supper in frightened whispers, and conjecturing moodily as to the fate of their late master. ”