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female! The sound of her through the wall is to me an emblem of the whole distracted misery of this age; and her barn-fanners' rhythm becomes all too signifiLife in London, chap. x.

cant.

THE ENGLISH CHURCH IN IRELAND

I FELT how English Protestants, or the sons of such, might with zealous affection like to assemble here once a week and remind themselves of English purities and decencies and Gospel ordinances, in the midst of a black, howling Babel of superstitious savagery, like Hebrews sitting by the streams of Babylon. But I felt more clearly than ever how impossible it was that an extraneous son of Adam, first seized by the terrible conviction that he had a soul to be saved or damned, that he must read the riddle of this universe or go to perdition everlasting, could for a moment think of taking this respectable "performance" as the solution of the mystery for him. Oh heavens! never in this world! Weep by the streams of Babel, decent, clean English Irish; weep, for there is cause, till you can do something better than weep; but expect no Babylonian or any other mortal to concern himself with that affair of yours.

SENTENCES

Ibid., chap. xvii.

VERILY, this whole world grows magical and hypermagical to me: death written on all, yet everlasting life also written on all. How Homers, and Mahomets, and Bulwers, and snuffy Socinian preachers, and all people and things that sojourned on earth, go marching, marching, towards the Inane, till, as your boys say, Flop! they are not. Ibid., chap. iv.

It is astonishing what real pity I do feel for these poor squires and squires' daughters, all parading about in such places. Good heavens! And this is what you call the flower of life: and age, and darkness, and the grand Perhaps lying close in the rear of it.

Life in London, chap. xiii.

THESE fringes of lamplight, struggling up through smoke and thousandfold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of Night, what thinks Boötes of them, as he leads his Hunting-Dogs over the Zenith in their leash of sidereal fire?

Sartor Resartus, I, iii.

THE Merovingian Kings, slowly wending on their bullock-carts through the streets of Paris, with their long hair flowing, have all wended slowly on, — into Eternity.

French Revolution, I, ii.

FRIGHTFUL to all men is Death; from of old named King of Terrors. Our little compact home of an Existence, where we dwelt complaining, yet as in a home, is passing, in dark agonies, into an Unknown of Separation, Foreignness, unconditioned Possibility. Ibid., I, iv.

HERALD shadows flit pale across the fire-brain of Mirabeau; heralds of the pale repose. While he tosses and storms, straining every nerve, in that sea of ambition and confusion, there comes, sombre and still, a monition that for him the issue of it will be swift death.

Ibid., X, vii.

SUCH issue came of Lambesc's charge on the Tuileries Garden: no striking of salutary terror into Chaillot promenaders; a striking into broad wakefulness of Frenzy and the three Furies - which otherwise were not asleep! For they lie always, those subterranean Eumenides (fabulous and yet so true), in the dullest existence of man; - and can dance, brandishing their dusky torches, shaking their serpent-hair.

French Revolution, IV, iv.

O POOR mortals, how ye make this Earth bitter for each other; this fearful and wonderful Life fearful and horrible; and Satan has his place in all hearts! Such agonies and ragings and wailings ye have, and have had, in all times: to be buried all, in so deep silence; and the salt sea is not swoln with your tears. Ibid., IV, v.

"NATURE in late centuries," says Sauerteig, "was universally supposed to be dead; an old eight-day clock, made many thousand years ago, and still ticking, but dead as brass which the Maker, at most, sat looking at, in a distant, singular, and indeed incredible manner."

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Past and Present, I, v.

BRAVE Sea-captain, Norse Sea-king- Columbus, my hero, royalest Sea-king of all! it is no friendly environment this of thine, in the waste deep waters; around thee mutinous discouraged soul., behind thee disgrace and ruin, before thee the unpenetrated veil of Night.

Ibid., III, xi.

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN
1801-1890

THE CLASSICS

LET us consider, too, how differently young and old are affected by the words of some classic author, such as Homer or Horace. Passages which to a boy are but rhetorical commonplaces, neither better nor worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply, which he gets by heart and thinks very fine, and imitates, as he thinks, successfully, in his own flowing versification, at length come home to him, when long years have passed, and he has had experience of life, and pierce him, as if he had never before known them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands of years, with a power over the mind, and a charm, which the current literature of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival. Perhaps this is the reason of the medieval opinion about Virgil, as if a prophet or magician; his single words and phrases, his pathetic half lines, giving utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time.

Grammar of Assent.

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RALPH WALDO EMERSON

1803-1882

THOUGHT AND REALITY

EACH man sees his own life defaced and disfigured, as the life of man is not to his imagination. Each man sees over his own experience a certain stain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any man go back to those delicious relations which make the beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan. Alas! I know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter in mature life the remembrances of budding joy, and cover every beloved name. Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual world — the painful kingdom of time and place dwell care and canker and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the Muses sing. But grief cleaves to names and persons and the partial interests of to-day and yesterday.

BEAUTY

Essays: Love.

THE ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyse the nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this

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