*****

We make love, and thereby ourselves fall the deeper in it. It is with
the heart only that one captures a heart.

*****

O, have it your own way; I am too old a hand to argue with young
gentlemen who choose to fancy themselves in love; I have too much
experience, thank you.

*****

And love, considered as a spectacle, must have attractions for many who
are not of the confraternity. The sentimental old maid is a commonplace
of the novelists; and he must be rather a poor sort of human being, to
be sure, who can look on at this pretty madness without indulgence and
sympathy. For nature commends itself to people with a most insinuating
art; the busiest is now and again arrested by a great sunset; and you
may be as pacific or as cold-blooded as you will, but you cannot help
some emotion when you read of well-disputed battles, or meet a pair of
lovers in the lane.

*****

Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the consequences of love; you may like
it or not, at pleasure; but there it is.

*****

With our chosen friends, on the other hand, and still more between
lovers (for mutual understanding is love's essence), the truth is easily
indicated by the one and aptly comprehended by the other. A hint taken,
a look understood, conveys the gist of long and delicate explanations;
and where the life is known even YEA and NAY become luminous. In the
closest of all relations--that of a love well founded and equally
shared-speech is half discarded, like a roundabout, infantile process
or a ceremony of formal etiquette; and the two communicate directly by
their presences, and with few looks and fewer words contrive to share
their good and evil and uphold each other's hearts in joy.

*****

And yet even while I was exulting in my solitude I became aware of a
strange lack. I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight,
silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship
more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is
solitude made perfect. And to live out of doors with the woman a man
loves is of all lives the most complete and free.

*****

The flower of the hedgerow and the star of heaven satisfy and delight
us: how much more the look of the exquisite being who was created to
bear and rear, to madden and rejoice mankind!

*****

So strangely are we built: so much more strong is the love of woman than
the mere love of life.

*****

You think that pity--and the kindred sentiments-have the greatest power
upon the heart. I think more nobly of women. To my view, the man
they love will first of all command their respect; he will be
steadfast-proud, if you please; dry-possibly-but of all things
steadfast. They will look at him in doubt; at last they will see that
stern face which he presents to all of the rest of the world soften
to them alone. First, trust, I say. It is so that a woman loves who is
worthy of heroes.

*****

The sex likes to pick up knowledge and yet preserve its superiority.
It is good policy, and almost necessary in the circumstances. If a
man finds a woman admires him, were it only for his acquaintance with
geography, he will begin at once to build upon the admiration. It is
only by unintermittent snubbing that the pretty ones can keep us in
our place. Men, as Miss Howe or Miss Harlowe would have said, 'are such
encroachers.' For my part, I am body and soul with the women; and after
a well-married couple, there is nothing so beautiful in the world as
the myth of the divine huntress. It is no use for a man to take to the
woods; we know him; Anthony tried the same thing long ago, and had a
pitiful time of it by all accounts. But there is this about some women,
which overtops the best gymnosophist among men, that they suffice
themselves, and can walk in a high and cold zone without the countenance
of any trousered being. I declare, although the reverse of a professed
ascetic, I am more obliged to women for this ideal than I should be to
the majority of them, or indeed to any but one, for a spontaneous kiss.
There is nothing so encouraging as the spectacle of self-sufficiency.
And when I think of the slim and lovely maidens, running the woods
all night to the note of Diana's horn; moving among the old oaks, as
fancy-free as they; things of the forest and the starlight, not touched
by the commotion of man's hot and turbid life-although there are plenty
other ideals that I should prefer--I find my heart beat at the thought
of this one. 'Tis to fail in life, but to fail with what a grace!
That is not lost which is not regretted. And where--here slips out the
male--where would be much of the glory of inspiring love, if there were
no contempt to overcome?

*****

The drawing-room is, indeed, an artificial place; it is so by our choice
and for our sins. The subjection of women; the ideal imposed upon them
from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much constancy;
their motherly, superior tenderness to man's vanity and self-importance;
their managing arts-the arts of a civilised slave among good-natured
barbarians-are all painful ingredients and all help to falsify
relations. It is not till we get clear of that amusing artificial scene
that genuine relations are founded, or ideas honestly compared. In
the garden, on the road or the hillside, or TETE-A-TETE and apart from
interruptions, occasions arise when we may learn much from any single
woman; and nowhere more often than in married life. Marriage is one long
conversation, chequered by disputes. The disputes are valueless; they
but ingrain the difference; the heroic heart of woman prompting her
at once to nail her colours to the mast. But in the intervals, almost
unconsciously and with no desire to shine, the whole material of life is
turned over and over, ideas are struck out and shared, the two persons
more and more adapt their notions one to suit the other, and in process
of time, without sound of trumpet, they conduct each other into new
worlds of thought.

*****

Kirstie was now over fifty, and might have sat to a sculptor. Long of
limb, and still light of foot, deep-breasted, robust-loined, her
golden hair not yet mingled with any trace of silver, the years had
but caressed and embellished her. By the lines of a rich and vigorous
maternity, she seemed destined to be the bride of heroes and the mother
of their children.

*****

And lastly, he was dark and she fair, and he was male and she female,
the everlasting fountain of interest.

*****

The effervescency of her passionate and irritable nature rose within
her at times to bursting point. This is the price paid by age for
unseasonable ardours of feeling.

*****

Weir must have supposed his bride to be somewhat suitable; perhaps he
belonged to that class of men who think a weak head the ornament of
women--an opinion invariably punished in this life.

*****

Never ask women folk. They're bound to answer 'No.' God never made the
lass that could resist the temptation.

*****

It is an odd thing how happily two people, if there are two, can live
in a place where they have no acquaintance. I think the spectacle of a
whole life in which you have no part paralyses personal desire. You are
content to become a mere spectator. The baker stands in his door; the
colonel with his three medals goes by to the CAFE at night; the troops
drum and trumpet and man the ramparts as bold as so many lions. It would
task language to say how placidly you behold all this. In a place where
you have taken some root you are provoked out of your indifference; you
have a hand in the game--your friends are fighting with the army. But in
a strange town, not small enough to grow too soon familiar, nor so large
as to have laid itself out for travellers, you stand so far apart from
the business that you positively forget it would be possible to go
nearer; you have so little human interest around you that you do not
remember yourself to be a man.

*****

Pity was her weapon and her weakness. To accept the loved one's faults,
although it has an air of freedom, is to kiss the chain.

*****

Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed,
variable men by its very awfulness. They have been so tried among the
inconstant squalls and currents, so often sailed for islands in the air
or lain becalmed with burning heart, that they will risk all for solid
ground below their feet. Desperate pilots, they run their sea-sick,
weary bark upon the dashing rocks. It seems as if marriage were the
royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we have
all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night when
we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will sober and
change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it needs but
an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is a wile
of the devil's. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing
faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling and
calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in this-that it is a
field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

*****

For there is something in marriage so natural and inviting, that the
step has an air of great simplicity and ease; it offers to bury for ever
many aching preoccupations; it is to afford us unfailing and familiar
company through life; it opens up a smiling prospect of the blest
and passive kind of love, rather than the blessing and active; it is
approached not only through the delights of courtship, but by a public
performance and repeated legal signatures. A man naturally thinks it
will go hard within such august circumvallations. And yet there is
probably no other act in a man's life so hot-headed and foolhardy as
this one of marriage.

*****

Again, when you have married your wife, you would think you were got
upon a hilltop, and might begin to go downward by an easy slope. But you
have only ended courting to begin marriage. Falling in love and winning
love are often difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious spirits;
but to keep in love is also a business of some importance, to which
both man and wife must bring kindness and goodwill. The true love story
commences at the altar, when there lies before the married pair a most
beautiful contest of wisdom and generosity, and a life-long struggle
towards an unattainable ideal. Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable,
from the very fact that they are two instead of one.

*****

When the generation is gone, when the play is over, when the thirty
years' panorama has been withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the
world, we may ask what has become of these great, weighty, and undying
loves and the sweethearts who despised mortal conditions in a fine
credulity; and they can only show us a few songs in a bygone taste, a
few actions worth remembering, and a few children who have retained some
happy stamp from the disposition of their parents.

*****

Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on
failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory. In the
first, he expects an angel for a wife; in the last, he knows that she
is like himself--erring, thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also,
filled with a struggling radiancy of better things, and adorned with
ineffective qualities. You may safely go to school with hope; but, ere
you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that
dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent playthings; that
hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realised, and
yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of life; that you yourself
are compacted of infirmities, perfect, you might say, in imperfections,
and yet you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and
that, while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you
will scarce find one but, by some generous reading, will become to you a
lesson, a model, and a noble spouse through life. So thinking, you
will constantly support your own unworthiness, and easily forgive the
failings of your friend. Nay, you will be wisely glad that you retain
the sense of blemishes; for the faults of married people continually
spur up each of them, hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love
upon a higher ground. And ever, between the failures, there will come
glimpses of kind virtues to encourage and console.

*****

But it is the object of a liberal education not only to obscure the
knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify the natural differences
between the two. Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but
principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is
astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the
girls and another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very
small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for
judgment and action; to the other, the world of life is more largely
displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionally widened. They are
taught to follow different virtues, to hate different vices, to place
their ideal, even for each other, in different achievements. What should
be the result of such a course? When a horse has run away, and the two
flustered people in the gig have each possessed themselves of a rein, we
know the end of that conveyance will be in the ditch. So, when I see a
raw youth and a green girl, fluted and fiddled in a dancing measure into
that most serious contract, and setting out upon life's journey with
ideas so monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that some make
shipwreck, but that any come to port.

*****

Those who have a few intimates are to be avoided; while those who swim
loose, who have their hat in their hand all along the street, who can
number an infinity of acquaintances, and are not chargeable with any
one friend, promise an easy disposition and no rival to the wife's
influence. I will not say they are the best of men, but they are
the stuff out of which adroit and capable women manufacture the best
husbands.

*****

A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is a marriage of love, for
absences are a good influence in love, and keep it bright and delicate;
but he is just the worst man if the feeling is more pedestrian, as habit
is too frequently torn open and the solder has never time to set.

*****

A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for people who would
spend years together and not bore themselves to death. But the talent,
like the agreement, must be for and about life. To dwell happily
together, they should be versed in the niceties of the heart, and born
with a faculty for willing compromise. The woman must be talented as a
woman, and it will not much matter although she is talented in nothing
else. She must know HER METIER DE FEMME, and have a fine touch for the
affections. And it is more important that a person should be a good
gossip, and talk pleasantly and smartly of common friends and the
thousand and one nothings of the day and hour, than that she should
speak with the tongues of men and angels; for a while together by
the fire happens more frequently in marriage than the presence of a
distinguished foreigner to dinner.... You could read Kant by yourself,
if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else. You
can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical
disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your
eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way
towards a dissolution of the marriage.

*****

Now this is where there should be community between man and wife. They
should be agreed on their catchword in FACTS OF RELIGION, OR FACTS
OF SCIENCE, OR SOCIETY, MY DEAR; for without such an agreement all
intercourse is a painful strain upon the mind.... For there are
differences which no habit nor affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian
must not intermarry with the Pharisee. Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. Samuel
Budgett, the wife of the successful merchant! The best of men and the
best of women may sometimes live together all their lives, and, for want
of some consent on fundamental questions, hold each other lost spirits
to the end.

*****

Marriage is of so much use to women, opens out to her so much more of
life, and puts her in the way of so much more freedom and usefulness,
that, whether she marry ill or well, she can hardly miss some benefit.
It is true, however, that some of the merriest and most genuine of women
are old maids; and that those old maids, and wives who are unhappily
married, have often most of the true motherly touch.

*****

The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and
cannot find it in our hearts either to marry or not to marry. Marriage
is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age. People who share a
cell in the Bastile, or are thrown together on an uninhabited isle,
if they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will find some possible
ground of compromise. They will learn each other's ways and humours,
so as to know where they must go warily, and where they may lean their
whole weight. The discretion of the first years becomes the settled
habit of the last; and so, with wisdom and patience, two lives may grow
indissolubly into one.

*****

'Well, an ye like maids so little, y'are true natural man; for God made
them twain by intention, and brought true love into the world, to be
man's hope and woman's comfort.'

*****

There are no persons so far away as those who are both married and
estranged, so that they seem out of earshot, or to have no common
tongue.

*****

My idea of man's chief end was to enrich the world with things of
beauty, and have a fairly good time myself while doing so.

*****

But the gymnast is not my favourite; he has little or no tincture of
the artist in his composition; his soul is small and pedestrian, for
the most part, since his profession makes no call upon it, and does not
accustom him to high ideas. But if a man is only so much of an actor
that he can stumble through a farce, he is made free of a new order of
thoughts. He has something else to think about beside the money-box. He
has a pride of his own, and, what is of far more importance, he has
an aim before him that he can never quite attain. He has gone upon a
pilgrimage that will last him his life long, because there is no end to
it short of perfection. He will better himself a little day by day; or,
even if he has given up the attempt, he will always remember that once
upon a time he had conceived this high ideal, that once upon a time he
fell in love with a star. 'Tis better to have loved and lost.' Although
the moon should have nothing to say to Endymion, although he should
settle down with Audrey and feed pigs, do you not think he would move
with a better grace and cherish higher thoughts to the end? The louts he
meets at church never had a fancy above Audrey's snood; but there is a
reminiscence in Endymion's heart that, like a spice, keeps it fresh and
haughty.

People do things, and suffer martyrdom, because they have an inclination
that way. The best artist is not the man who fixes his eye on posterity,
but the one who loves the practice of his art. And instead of having a
taste for being successful merchants and retiring at thirty, some people
have a taste for high and what we call heroic forms of excitement.

*****

These are predestined; if a man love the labour of any trade, apart from
any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.

*****

The incommunicable thrill of things, that is the tuning-fork by which
we test the flatness of our art. Here it is that Nature teaches and
condemns, and still spurs us up to further effort and new failure.

*****

To please is to serve; and so far from its being difficult to instruct
while you amuse, it is difficult to do the one thoroughly without the
other.

*****

We shall never learn the affinities of beauty, for they lie too deep in
nature and too far back in the mysterious history of man.

*****

Mirth, lyric mirth, and a vivacious contentment are of the very essence
of the better kind of art.

*****

This is the particular crown and triumph of the artist--not to be true
merely, but to be lovable; not simply to convince, but to enchant.

*****

Life is hard enough for poor mortals, without having it indefinitely
embittered for them by bad art.

*****

So that the first duty of any man who is to write is intellectual.
Designedly or not, he has so far set himself up for a leader in
the minds of men; and he must see that his own mind is kept supple,
charitable, and bright. Everything but prejudice should find a voice
through him; he should see the good in all things; where he has even
a fear that he does not wholly understand, there he should be wholly
silent; and he should recognise from the first that he has only one tool
in his workshop, and that tool is sympathy.

*****

Through no art beside the art of words can the kindness of a man's
affections be expressed. In the cuts you shall find faithfully paraded
the quaintness and the power, the triviality and the surprising
freshness of the author's fancy; there you shall find him outstripped
in ready symbolism and the art of bringing things essentially invisible
before the eyes: but to feel the contact of essential goodness, to
be made in love with piety, the book must be read and not the prints
examined.

*****

And then I had an idea for John Silver from which I promised myself
funds of entertainment: to take an admired friend of mine (whom the
reader very likely knows and admires as much as I do), to deprive him of
all his finer qualities and higher graces of temperament, to leave
him with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness, and
his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms of the
culture of a raw tarpaulin, such physical surgery is, I think, a common
way of 'making character'; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way. We can
put in the quaint figure that spoke a hundred words with us yesterday
by the wayside; but do we know him? Our friend with his infinite variety
and flexibility, we know-but can we put him in? Upon the first, we must
engraft secondary and imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong; from
the second, knife in hand, we must cut away and deduct the needless
arborescence of his nature, but the trunk and the few branches that
remain we may at least be fairly sure of.

*****

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself
should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt
clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with
the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of
continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run
thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if
it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.

*****

The obvious is not of necessity the normal; fashion rules and deforms;
the majority fall tamely into the contemporary shape, and thus attain,
in the eyes of the true observer, only a higher power of insignificance;
and the danger is lest, in seeking to draw the normal, a man should draw
the null, and write the novel of society instead of the romance of man.

*****

There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare
and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of
men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others.

*****

Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the student who does
not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is still the
one quality in which he may improve himself at will. Passion, wisdom,
creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour
of birth, and can be neither learned nor stimulated. But the just and
dexterous use of what qualities we have, the proportion of one part to
another and to the whole, the elision of the useless, the accentuation
of the important, and the preservation of a uniform character end to
end--these, which taken together constitute technical perfection, are to
some degree within the reach of industry and intellectual courage.

*****

The love of words and not a desire to publish new discoveries, the love,
of form and not a novel reading of historical events, mark the vocation
of the writer and the painter.

*****

The life of the apprentice to any art is both unstrained and pleasing;
it is strewn with small successes in the midst of a career of failure,
patiently supported; the heaviest scholar is conscious of a certain
progress; and if he come not appreciably nearer to the art of
Shakespeare, grows letter-perfect in the domain of A-B, ab.

*****

The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the skill of him that writes,
but as much, perhaps, in the inherited experience of him who reads; and
when I hear with a particular thrill of things that I have never done
or seen, it is one of that innumerable army of my ancestors rejoicing in
past deeds. Thus novels begin to touch not the fine DILETTANTI but the
gross mass of mankind, when they leave off to speak of parlours and
shades of manner and still-born niceties of motive, and begin to deal
with fighting, sailoring, adventure, death or childbirth; and thus
ancient outdoor crafts and occupations, whether Mr. Hardy wields the
shepherd's crook or Count Tolstoi swings the scythe, lift romance into a
near neighbourhood with epic. These aged things have on them the dew
of man's morning; they lie near, not so much to us, the semi-artificial
flowerets, as to the trunk and aboriginal taproot of the race. A
thousand interests spring up in the process of the ages, and a thousand
perish; that is now an eccentricity or a lost art which was once the
fashion of an empire; and those only are perennial matters that rouse us
to-day, and that roused men in all epochs of the past.

*****

L'ART DE BIEN DIRE is but a drawing-room accomplishment unless it be
pressed into the service of the truth. The difficulty of literature is
not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but
to affect him precisely as you wish. This is commonly understood in the
case of books or set orations; even in making your will, or writing an
explicit letter, some difficulty is admitted by the world. But one thing
you can never make Philistine natures understand; one thing, which
yet lies on the surface, remains as unseizable to their wits as a
high flight of metaphysics-namely, that the business of life is mainly
carried on by means of this difficult art of literature, and according
to a man's proficiency in that art shall be the freedom and fulness of
his intercourse with other men. Anybody, it is supposed, can say what
he means; and, in spite of their notorious experience to the contrary,
people so continue to suppose.

*****

Even women, who understand men so well for practical purposes, do not
know them well enough for the purposes of art. Take even the very best
of their male creations, take Tito Melema, for instance, and you will
find he has an equivocal air, and every now and again remembers he has a
comb in the back of his head. Of course, no woman will believe this, and
many men will be so polite as to humour their incredulity.

*****

A dogma learned is only a new error--the old one was perhaps as good;
but a spirit communicated is a perpetual possession. These best teachers
climb beyond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves, and what is
best in themselves, that they communicate.

*****

In this world of imperfections we gladly welcome even partial
intimacies. And if we find but one to whom we can speak out our
heart freely, with whom we can walk in love and simplicity without
dissimulation, we have no ground of quarrel with the world or God.

*****

But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of
this world-all, too, travellers with a donkey; and the best that we find
in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds
many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward
of life. They keep us worthy of. ourselves; and when we are alone, we
are only nearer to the absent.

*****

We are all INCOMPRIS, only more or less concerned for the mischance; all
trying wrongly to do right; all fawning at each other's feet like dumb,
neglected lap-dogs. Sometimes we catch an eye-this is our opportunity in
the ages--and we wag our tail with a poor smile. 'IS THAT ALL?' All?
If you only knew! But how can they know? They do not love us; the more
fools we to squander life on the indifferent. But the morality of the
thing, you will be glad to hear, is excellent; for it is only by trying
to understand others that we can get our own hearts understood; and
in matters of human feeling the clement judge is the most successful
pleader.

*****

There is no friendship so noble, but it is the product of the time; and
a world of little finical observances, and little frail proprieties and
fashions of the hour, go to make or to mar, to stint or to perfect,
the union of spirits the most loving and the most intolerant of such
interference. The trick of the country and the age steps in even between
the mother and her child, counts out their caresses upon niggardly
fingers, and says, in the voice of authority, that this one thing shall
be a matter of confidence between them, and this other thing shall not.

*****

There is not anything more bitter than to lose a fancied friend.

*****

The habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, and live truly with his
wife and friends; while another man who never told a formal falsehood in
his life may yet be himself one lie-heart and face, from top to bottom.
This is the kind of lie which poisons intimacy. And, vice versa,
veracity to sentiment, truth in a relation, truth to your own heart and
your friends, never to feign or falsify emotion--that is the truth which
makes love possible and mankind happy.

*****

But surely it is no very extravagant opinion that it is better to give
than to receive, to serve than to use our companions; and, above all,
where there is no question of service upon either side, that it is good
to enjoy their company like a natural man.

*****

A man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one
so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his
happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate--a death, a few
light words, a piece of stamped paper, or a woman's bright eyes--he may
be left in a month destitute of all.

*****

In these near intimacies, we are ninety-nine times disappointed in our
beggarly selves for once that we are disappointed in our friend; that it
is we who seem most frequently undeserving of the love that unites us;
and that it is by our friend's conduct that we are continually rebuked
and yet strengthened for a fresh endeavour.

*****

'There are some pains,' said he, 'too acute for consolation, or I would
bring them to my kind consoler.'

*****

But there are duties which come before gratitude and offences which
justly divide friends, far more acquaintances.

*****

Life, though largely, is not entirely carried on by literature. We
are subject to physical passions and contortions; the voice breaks and
changes, and speaks by unconscious and winning inflections; we have
legible countenances, like an open book; things that cannot be said look
eloquently through the eyes; and the soul, not locked into the body as a
dungeon, dwells ever on the threshold with appealing signals. Groans
and tears, looks and gestures, a flush or a paleness, are often the most
clear reporters of the heart, and speak more directly to the hearts of
others.

*****

We are different with different friends; yet if we look closely we shall
find that every such relation reposes on some particular apotheosis of
oneself; with each friend, although we could not distinguish it in words
from any other, we have at least one special reputation to preserve: and
it is thus that we run, when mortified, to our friend or the woman that
we love, not to hear ourselves called better, but to be better men in
point of fact. We seek this society to flatter ourselves with our own
good conduct. And hence any falsehood in the relation, any incomplete or
perverted understanding, will spoil even the pleasure of these visits.

But it follows that since they are neither of them so good as the other
hopes, and each is, in a very honest manner, playing a part above his
powers, such an intercourse must often be disappointing to both.

*****

It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle ready-made
from the hands of opportunity; and that was the lawyer's way. His
friends were those of his own blood, or those whom he had known the
longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied
no aptness in the object.

*****

Of those who are to act influentially on their fellows, we should expect
always something large and public in their way of life, something more
or less urbane and comprehensive in their sentiment for others. We
should not expect to see them spend their sympathy in idyls, however
beautiful. We should not seek them among those who, if they have but a
wife to their bosom, ask no more of womankind, just as they ask no more
of their own sex, if they can find a friend or two for their
immediate need. They will be quick to feel all the pleasures of our
association-not the great ones alone, but all. They will know not love
only, but all those other ways in which man and woman mutually make
each other happy-by sympathy, by admiration, by the atmosphere they bear
about them-down to the mere impersonal pleasure of passing happy faces
in the street. For, through all this gradation, the difference of sex
makes itself pleasurably felt. Down to the most lukewarm courtesies of
life, there is a special chivalry due and a special pleasure received,
when the two sexes are brought ever so lightly into contact. We love our
mothers otherwise than we love our fathers; a sister is not as a brother
to us; and friendship between man and woman, be it never so unalloyed
and innocent, is not the same as friendship between man and man. Such
friendship is not even possible for all. To conjoin tenderness for a
woman that is not far short of passionate with such disinterestedness
and beautiful gratuity of affection as there is between friends of the
same sex, requires no ordinary disposition in the man. For either it
would presuppose quite womanly delicacy of perception, and, as it were,
a curiosity in shades of differing sentiment; or it would mean that
he had accepted the large, simple divisions of society: a strong
and positive spirit robustly virtuous, who has chosen a better part
coarsely, and holds to it steadfastly, with all its consequences of pain
to himself and others; as one who should go straight before him on a
journey, neither tempted by wayside flowers nor very scrupulous of small
lives under foot.

*****

I could have thought he had been eaves-dropping at the doors of my
heart, so entire was the coincidence between his writing and my thought.

*****

A knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things, even
as they are little things, not much otherwise than we have seen them,
will continue to the end to be one of life's choicest pleasures.

*****

     The morning drum-call on my eager ear
     Thrills unforgotten yet; the morning dew
     Lies yet undried along my field of noon.
     But now I pause at whiles in what I do,
     And count the bell, and tremble lest I hear
     (My work untrimmed) the sunset gun too soon.

*****

The ground of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting
of the grave, is nothing else than naked, ignorant selfishness. It is
himself that he sees dead; those are his virtues that are forgotten; his
is the vague epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue; for
where a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, he goes
through fire unshielded. In every part and corner of our life, to lose
oneself is to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this
poor, laughable, and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments;
himself, giant Prometheus, is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus.
But by and by his truant interests will leave that tortured body, slip
abroad and gather flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an
altered guise; no longer as a doom peculiar to himself, whether fate's
crowning injustice or his own last vengeance upon those who fail to
value him; but now as a power that wounds him far more tenderly, not
without solemn compensations, taking and giving, bereaving and yet
storing up.

*****

The interests of youth are rarely frank; his passions, like Noah's dove,
come home to roost. The fire, sensibility, and volume of his own nature,
that is all that he has learned to recognise. The tumultuary and gray
tide of life, the empire of routine, the unrejoicing faces of his
elders, fill him with contemptuous surprise; there also he seems to walk
among the tombs of spirits; and it is only in the course of years, and
after much rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to
see himself from without and his fellows from within: to know his own
for one among the thousand undenoted countenances of the city street,
and to divine in others the throb of human agony and hope. In the
meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, the cripple,
the sweet whiff of chloroform-for there, on the most thoughtless, the
pains of others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a
divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of
man's life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his
ambitious thought. He cannot bear to have come for so little, and to go
again so wholly. He cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be
still idle, and by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do.
The parable of the talent is the brief, epitome of youth. To believe in
immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.
Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be taken
gravely and in evil part; that young men may come to think of time as of
a moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the inadequate gift. Yet
here is a true peril; this it is that sets them to pace the graveyard
alleys and to read, with strange extremes of pity and derision, the
memorials of the dead.

Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon
their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance, and immediacy
of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to
excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity
of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back
not least. But the average sermon flees the point, disporting itself in
that eternity of which we know, and need to know, so little; avoiding
the bright, crowded, and momentous fields of life where destiny awaits
us.

*****

And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies himself dying will
get cold comfort from the very youthful view expressed in this essay.
He, as a living man, has some to help, some to love, some to correct; it
may be some to punish. These duties cling, not upon humanity, but upon
the man himself. It is he, not another, who is one woman's son and a
second woman's husband, and a third woman's father. That life which
began so small has now grown, with a myriad filaments, into the lives
of others. It is not indispensable; another will take the place and
shoulder the discharged responsibilities; but the better the man and
the nobler his purposes, the more will he be tempted to regret the
extinction of his powers and the deletion of his personality. To have
lived a generation is not only to have grown at home in that perplexing
medium, but to have assumed innumerable duties. To die at such an age
has, for all but the entirely base, something of the air of a betrayal.

*****

Even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career,
laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed
with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at
once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited
in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace,
foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an
end in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those
whom the gods love die young, I cannot help believing they had this sort
of death also in their eye. For, surely, at whatever age it overtake the
man, this is to die young.

*****

And so they were at last in 'their resting graves.' So long as men do
their duty, even if it be greatly in a misapprehension, they will be
leading pattern lives; and whether or not they come to lie beside a
martyrs' monument, we may be sure they will find a safe haven somewhere
in the providence of God. It is not well to think of death, unless
we temper the thought with that of heroes who despised it. Upon what
ground, is of small account; if it be only the bishop who was burned for
his faith in the antipodes, his memory lightens the heart and makes
us walk undisturbed among graves. And so the martyrs' monument is a
wholesome spot in the field of the dead; and as we look upon it, a
brave influence comes to us from the land of those who have won their
discharge, and in another phrase of Patrick Walker's, got 'cleanly off
the stage.'

*****

It is not only our enemies, those desperate characters-it is we
ourselves who know not what we do;-thence springs the glimmering hope
that perhaps we do better than we think: that to scramble through this
random business with hands reasonably clean, to have played the part of
a man or woman with some reasonable fulness, to have often resisted the
diabolic, and at the end to be still resisting it, is for the poor human
soldier to have done right well.

*****

We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our delight;
we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a legend.

*****

There are many spiritual eyes that seem to spy upon our actions-eyes
of the dead and the absent, whom we imagine to behold us in our most
private hours, and whom we fear and scruple to offend: our witnesses and
judges.

*****

How unsubstantial is this projection of a man s existence, which can lie
in abeyance for centuries and then be brushed up again and set forth for
the consideration of posterity by a few dips in an antiquary's ink-pot!
This precarious tenure of fame goes a long way to justify those (and
they are not few) who prefer cakes and cream in the immediate present.

*****

But I beard the voice of a woman singing some sad, old endless ballad
not far off. It seemed to be about love and a BEL AMOUREUX, her handsome
sweetheart; and I wished I could have taken up the strain and answered
her, as I went on upon my invisible woodland way, weaving, like Pippa in
the poem, my own thoughts with hers. What could I have told her? Little
enough; and yet all the heart requires. How the world gives and takes
away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again into
distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which
makes the world a garden; and 'hope, which comes to all,' outwears the
accidents of life, and reaches with tremulous hand beyond the grave
and death. Easy to say: yea, but also, by God's mercy, both easy and
grateful to believe!

*****

As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of with more fearful
whisperings than this prospect of death, few have less influence on
conduct under healthy circumstances.... If we clung as devotedly as some
philosophers pretend we do to the abstract idea of life, or were half
as frightened as they make out we are, for the subversive accident
that ends it all, the trumpets might sound by the hour and no one would
follow them into battle--the blue-peter might fly at the truck, but who
would climb into a sea-going ship? Think (if these philosophers were
right) with what a preparation of spirit we should affront the daily
peril of the dinner-table: a deadlier spot than any battle-field
in history, where the far greater proportion of our ancestors have
miserably left their bones! What woman would ever be lured into
marriage, so much more dangerous than the wildest sea? And what would it
be to grow old?

*****

If a man knows he will sooner or later be robbed upon a journey, he
will have a bottle of the best in every inn, and look upon all his
extravagances as so much gained upon the thieves. And, above all, where,
instead of simply spending, he makes a profitable investment for some
of his money when it will be out of risk of loss. So every bit of brisk
living, and, above all, when it is healthful, is just so much gained
upon the wholesale filcher, death. We shall have the less in our
pockets, the more in our stomachs, when he cries, 'Stand and deliver.'

*****

It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a
miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in
the sickroom. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not
give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push
and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in finished
undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour. A spirit goes out
of the man who means execution, which outlives the most untimely ending.
All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good
work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every
heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse
behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

*****

Now the man who has his heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling
weathercock of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly
used and cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance of the
world, keeps all his pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as
he runs, until, if he be running towards anything better than wildfire,
he may shoot up and become a constellation in the end.

*****

When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left
about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed
much:-surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed,
nor will he complain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from
the field; defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius!--but if
there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured.
The faith which sustained him in his lifelong blindness and lifelong
disappointment will scarce even be required in this last formality of
laying down his arms. Give him a march with his old bones; there, out
of the glorious sun-coloured earth, out of the day and the dust and the
ecstasy-there goes another Faithful Failure.

*****

We are apt to make so much of the tragedy of the tragedy of death, and
think so little of the enduring tragedy of some men's lives, that we
see more to lament for in a life cut off in the midst of usefulness and
love, than in one that miserably survives all love and usefulness, and
goes about the world the phantom of itself, without hope, or joy, or any
consolation.

*****

'You are a strange physician,' said Will, looking steadfastly upon his
guest.

'I am a natural law,' he replied, 'and people call me Death.'

'Why did you not tell me so at first?' cried Will.

'I have been waiting for you these many years. Give me your hand, and
welcome.'

*****

     Under the wide and starry sky
     Dig the grave and let me lie.
     Glad did I live, and gladly die,
     And I laid me down with a will.

     This be the verse you grave for me:
     Here he lies where he longed to be;
     Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
     And the hunter home from the hill.

*****

But the girls picked up their skirts, as if they were sure they had good
ankles, and followed until their breath was out. The last to weary were
the three graces and a couple of companions; and just as they, too,
had had enough, the foremost of the three leaped upon a tree-stump and
kissed her hand to the canoeists. Not Diana herself, although this
was more of a Venus, after all, could have done a graceful thing more
gracefully. 'Come back again!' she cried; and all the others echoed
her; and the hills about Origny repeated the words, 'Come back.' But the
river had us round an angle in a twinkling, and we were alone with the
green trees and running water.

Come back? There is no coming back, young ladies, on the impetuous
stream of life.

      'The merchant bows unto the seaman's star,
      The plowman from the sun his season takes.'

And we must all set our pocket watches by the clock of fate. There is
a headlong, forthright tide, that bears away man with his fancies like
straw, and runs fast in time and space. It is full of curves like this,
your winding river of the Oise; and lingers and returns in pleasant
pastorals; and yet, rightly thought upon, never returns at all. For
though it should revisit the same acre of meadow in the same hour, it
will have made an ample sweep between-whiles; many little streams will
have fallen in; many exhalations risen toward the sun; and even although
it were the same acre, it will not be the same river Oise. And thus, oh
graces of Origny, although the wandering fortune of my life should carry
me back again to where you await death's whistle by the river, that will
not be the old I who walks the streets; and those wives and mothers,
say, will those be you?

*****

          THE CELESTIAL SURGEON

        If I have faltered more or less
        In my great task of happiness;
        If I have moved among my race
        And shown no glorious morning face;
        If beams from happy human eyes
        Have moved me not; if morning skies,
        Books, and my food, and summer rain
        Knocked on my sullen heart in vain
        Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take
        And stab my spirit broad awake;
        Or, Lord, if too obdurate I,
        Choose Thou, before that spirit die,
        A piercing pain, a killing sin,
        And to my dead heart run them in!