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He saw instead a foreground which was just as lovely – the level sunlight lying like transparent gold among the gently-curving stems of the feathered grass and the tall red sorrel, and the white umbels7 of the hemlocks lining the bushy hedgerows.
He was but three-and-twenty, and had only just learned what it is to love – to love with that adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself. Love of this sort is hardly distinguishable from religious feeling.
What deep and worthy love is so? whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies, all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.
Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.
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We are apt to be kinder to the brutes that love us than to the women that love us. Is it because the brutes are dumb?
‘But, mother, thee know’st we canna love just where other folks ’ud have us.
if you’ve got a man’s heart and soul in you, you can’t be easy a-making your own bed an’ leaving the rest to lie on the stones.
in our eagerness to explain impressions, we often lose our hold of the sympathy that comprehends them.
I think it’s better to see when your perpendicular’s true, than to see a ghost.’
When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
imagination is a licensed trespasser:
think, sir, when God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was – he only saw the brightness of the Lord.
Young souls, in such pleasant delirium as hers, are as unsympathetic as butterflies sipping nectar; they are isolated from all appeals by a barrier of dreams – by invisible looks and impalpable arms.
Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.
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She looked round with blank eyes at the dirt and confusion on which the bright afternoon’s sun shone dismally; it was all of a piece with the sad confusion of her mind – that confusion which belongs to the first hours of a sudden sorrow, when the poor human soul is like one who has been deposited sleeping among the ruins of a vast city, and wakes up in dreary amazement, not knowing whether it is the growing or the dying day – not knowing why and whence came this illimitable scene of desolation, or why he too finds himself desolate in the midst of it.
There’s no comfort for me no more,’ she went on, the tears coming when she began to speak, ‘now thy poor feyther’s gone,
‘Yes, dear friend, your affliction is great. It would be hardness of heart to say that your trouble was not heavy to bear. God didn’t send me to you to make light of your sorrow, but to mourn with you, if you will let me.
‘Yes,’ said Dinah, careful not to oppose any feeling of Lisbeth’s, for her reliance, in her smallest words and deeds, on a divine guidance, always issued in that finest woman’s tact which proceeds from acute and ready sympathy – ‘yes; I remember, too, when my dear aunt died, I longed for the sound of her bad cough in the nights, instead of the silence that came when she was gone.
Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.
And then he says, in some o’ those counties it’s as flat as the back o’ your hand, and you can see nothing of a distance, without climbing up the highest trees. I couldn’t abide that: I like to go to work by a road that’ll take me up a bit of a hill, and see the fields for miles round me, and a bridge, or a town, or a bit of a steeple here and there. It makes you feel the world’s a big place, and there’s other men working in it with their heads and hands besides yourself.’
like th’ hills best,’ said Seth, ‘when the clouds are over your head, and you see the sun shining ever so far off, over the Loamford way, as I’ve often done o’ late, on the stormy days: it seems to me as if that was heaven where there’s always joy and sunshine, though this life’s dark and cloudy.’
Then they looked at each other, not quite as they had looked before, for in their eyes there was the memory of a kiss.
One begins to suspect at length that there is no direct correlation between eyelashes and morals;
She closed her eyes, that she might feel more intensely the presence of a Love and Sympathy deeper and more tender than was breathed from the earth and sky. That was often Dinah’s mode of praying in solitude. Simply to close her eyes, and to feel herself enclosed by the Divine Presence; then gradually her fears, her yearning anxieties for others, melted away like ice-crystals in a warm ocean.
The progress of civilization has made a breakfast or a dinner an easy and cheerful substitute for more troublesome and disagreeable ceremonies.
He says college mostly makes people like bladders – just good for nothing but t’ hold the stuff as is poured into ’em.
But it happens, on the contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath.
It is so very rarely that facts hit that nice medium required by our own enlightened opinions and refined taste!
The world is not just what we like; do touch it up with a tasteful pencil, and make believe it is not quite such a mixed entangled affair.
Let all people who hold unexceptionable opinions act unexceptionably.
These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people – amongst whom your life is passed – that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people, whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire – for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience.
it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
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human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty – it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.
Hetty, whose heart was fluttering so at the thought of some one she expected to see at church, that she hardly felt the ground she trod on.
Chad Cranage looks like quite a new acquaintance to-day, for he has got his clean Sunday face, which always makes his little granddaughter cry at him as a stranger.
For none of the old people held books – why should they? not one of them could read. But they knew a few ‘good words’ by heart, and their withered lips now and then moved silently, following the service without any very clear comprehension indeed, but with a simple faith in its efficacy to ward off harm and bring blessing.
The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past: no wonder the secret escapes the unsympathizing observer, who might as well put on his spectacles to discern odours.
It’s well we should feel as life’s a reckoning we can’t make twice over; there’s no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right.’
Men’s muscles move better when their souls are making merry music,
I say we might be glad to get sight o’ Dinah’s cap again, wi’ her own face under it, border or no border. For she’s one o’ them things as looks the brightest on a rainy day, and loves you the best when you’re most i’ need on’t.’
(Here Vixen tucked her tail between her legs, and ran forward into the house. Subjects are sometimes broached which a well-bred female will ignore.)
‘You’re about as near the right language as a pig’s squeaking is like a tune played on a key-bugle.’
The beginning of hardship is like the first taste of bitter food – it seems for a moment unbearable; yet, if there is nothing else to satisfy our hunger, we take another bite and find it possible to go on.
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but so does every sin cause suffering to others besides those who commit it.
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But isn’t the suffering less hard when you have somebody with you, that feels for you – that you can speak to, and say what’s in your heart?
‘Well,’ said Bartle, taking off his spectacles, and putting them into his pocket, ‘if there must be women to make trouble in the world, it’s but fair there should be women to be comforters under it; and she’s one – she’s one. It’s a pity she’s a Methodist; but there’s no getting a woman without some foolishness or other.’
That is a simple scene, reader. But it is almost certain that you, too, have been in love – perhaps, even, more than once, though you may not choose to say so to all your feminine friends. If so, you will no more think the slight words, the timid looks, the tremulous touches, by which two human souls approach each other gradually, like two little quivering rain-streams, before they mingle into one – you will no more think these things trivial than you will think the first-detected signs of coming spring trivial, though they be but a faint, indescribable something in the air and in the song of
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I’m not so good as you. I can’t doubt it’s right for me to love the best thing God’s ever given me to know.’
‘Say!’ answered Mrs Poyser, with dangerous fire kindling in her eye; ‘why, I say as some folks’ tongues are like the clocks as run on strikin’, not to tell you the time o’ the day, but because there’s summat wrong i’ their own inside’ …
