To see men wholly led by affection, admired and censured out of opinion without judgment: an inconsiderate multitude, like so many dogs in a village, if one bark, all bark without a cause: as fortune’s fan turns, if one man be in favour, or commended by some great one, all the world applauds him; if in disgrace, in an instant all hate him, and as at the sun when he is eclipsed, that erstwhile took no notice, now gaze and state upon him.

They are universally considered to be the finest ever bred in England, and are now in a most thriving condition.

The receding depths of time and space, though they can indeed be haltingly conceived even by primitive minds, cannot be imagined save by beings of a more ample nature. A panorama of mountains appears to naive vision almost as a flat picture, and the starry void is a roof pricked with light. Yet in reality, while the immediate terrain could be spanned in an hour’s walking, the sky-line of peaks holds within it plain beyond plain. Similarly with time. While the near past and the near future display within them depth beyond depth, time’s remote immensities are foreshortened into flatness. It is almost inconceivable to simple minds that man’s whole history should be but a moment in the life of the stars, and that remote events should embrace within themselves aeon upon aeon.

I don’t know what it was, in her touch or voice, that made that song the most unearthly I have ever heard in my life, or can imagine. There was something fearful in the reality of it. It was as if it had never been written, or set to music, but sprung out the passion within her; which found imperfect utterance in the low sounds of her voice, and crouched again when all was still.

Placed in the midst of arid deserts, where the fleet but timid antelope, and the cunning but powerless monkey fall his easy and unresisting prey; or roaming through the dense forests and scarcely penetrable jungles, where the elephant and the buffalo find in their unwieldy bulk and massive strength no adequate protection against the impetuous agility and fierce determination of his attacks, he sways an almost undisputed sceptre, and stalks boldly forth in fearless majesty.

He was a little light-haired gentleman, with undeniable boots, and the stiffest of white cravats and shirt-collars. He was buttoned up mighty trim and tight, and must have taken a great deal of pains with his whiskers, which were accurately curled. His gold watch-chain was so massive, that a fancy came across me that he ought to have a sinewy golden arm, to draw it out with, like those which are put up over the gold-beaters’ shops. He was got up with such care, and was so stiff, that he could hardly bend himself; being obliged, when he glanced at some papers on his desk, after sitting down in his chair, to move his whole body, from the bottom of his spine, like Punch.

To those who live in the narrow circle of human interests and human feelings, there ever exists, unheeded, almost unnoticed, before their very eyes, the most humbling proofs of their own comparative insignificance in the scale of creation, which, in the midst of their admitted mastery over the earth and all it contains, it would be well for them to consider, if they would obtain just views of what they are and what they were intended to be.

Let them exercise their sublime and boasted reason, I said to myself, in endeavoring to comprehend infinity in any thing, and we will note the result! If it be in space, we shall find them setting bounds to their illimitable void, until ashamed of the feebleness of their first effort, it is renewed, again and again, only to furnish new proofs of the insufficiency of all of earth, even to bring within the compass of their imaginations truths that all their experiments, inductions, evidence and revelations compel them to admit.

Betty: They are gone, sir, in great Anger.
Petulant: Enough, let ‘em trundle. Anger helps Complexion, saves Paint.

Shall I say thou art a man, that hast all the symptoms of a beast? How shall i know thee to be a man? By thy shape? That affrights me more, when I see a beast in likeness of a man.

And yet with crimes to us unknown,
Our sons shall mark the coming age their own.

He was a madman that said it, and thou peradventure are as mad to read it.

For princes are the glass, the school, the book
Where subjects’ eyes do learn, do read, do look.

…at first, while the Sun was bright, he went merrily on, and without any Difficulty reached the Heart of the Labyrinth and got the Jewel, and so set out on his way back rejoycing: but as the Night fell, wherein all the Beasts of the Forest do move, he begun to be sensible of some Creature keeping Pace with him and, as he thought, peering and looking upon him from the next Alley to that he was in; and that when he should stop, this Companion should stop also, which put him in some Disorder of Spirits. And, indeed, as the Darkness increas’d, it seemed to him that there was more than one, and, it might be, even a whole Band of such Followers: at least so he judg’d by the Rustling and Cracking that they kept among the Thickets; besides that there would be at a Time a Sound of Whispering, which seem’d to import a Conference among them. But in regard of who they were or what Form they were of, he would not be persuaded to say what he thought.

As a Dutch host, if you come to an inn in Germany and dislike your fare, diet, lodging, etc., replies in a surly tone, Aliud tibi quaeras diversorium [If you like not this, get you to another inn]: I resolve, if you like not my writing, go read something else. I do not much esteem thy censure.

I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and such like; which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies, and sea-fights; peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarums. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances, are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays ; then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of princes, new discoveries, expeditions, now comical, then tragical matters. Today we hear of new lords and officers created, to-morrow of some great men deposed, and then again of fresh honours conferred; one is let loose, another imprisoned; one purchaseth, another breaketh; he thrives, his neighbour turns bankrupt; now plenty, then again dearth and famine; one runs, another rides, wrangles, laughs, weeps, &c. Thus I daily hear, and such like, both private and public news, amidst the gallantry and misery of the world—

Blind fury, or error, or rashness, or what it is that eggs them, I know not; I am sure many times, which Austin perceived long since, tempestate contentionis, serenitas caritatis obnubilatur [with this tempest of contention the serenity of charity is overclouded], and there be too many spirits conjured up already in this kind in all sciences, and more than we can tell how to lay, which do so furiously rage, and keep such a racket, that as Fabius said, “It had been much better for some of them to have been born dumb, and altogether illiterate, than so far to dote to their own destruction.”

Have I so much leisure, or little business of my own, as to look after other men’s matters which concern me not?

I said unto the fools, ‘deal not so madly’

If that severe doom of Synesius be true, “It is a greater offense to steal men’s labours than their clothes,” what shall become of most writers?

Thou may’st be searched for polish’d words and verse
By flippant spouter, emptiest of praters:
Tell him to seek them in some mawkish verse:
My periods are all rough as nutmeg graters.

Mr. Gammon marked the progress of the Earl’s feelings with the greatest interest, perceiving the increasing extent to which respect for him—Gammon—was mingling with his lordship’s sublime self-satisfaction; and, watching his opportunity, struck a spark into the dry tinder of his vain imagination, blew it gently—and saw that it caught, and spread.

…those visitors to forlorn houses, about whom you may not be familiar, who make “strange noises in the night, howl sometimes pitifully, and then laugh again, cause great flame and sudden lights, fling stones, rattle chains,” and if you wake to find your beard shaved and your chin smooth, they will be the impish cause.

At these mysteriously significant symbols, however, Mr. Titmouse, though quite ready to believe that they indicated some just cause or other of family pride, had looked with the same appreciating intelligence which you may fancy you see a chicken displaying, while hesitatingly clapping its foot upon, and quaintly cocking its eye at, a slip of paper lying in a yard, covered over with algebraic characters and calculations.

But he had long been secretly fired with the glory of Hercules, whom he held in the highest esteem, listening with great attention to such as related his achievements, particularly to those that had seen him, conversed with him, and had been witnesses to his prowess. He was affected in the same manner as Themistocles afterwards was, when he declared that the trophies of Miltiades would not suffer him to sleep.

Yet man dies not while the world, at once his mother and his monument, remains. His name is forgotten, indeed, but the breath he breathed yet stirs the pine-tops on the mountains, the sound of the words he spoke yet echoes on through space; the thoughts his brain gave birth to we have inherited to-day; his passions are our cause of life; the joys and sorrows that he felt are our familiar friends — the end from which he fled aghast will surely overtake us also.

Truly the universe is full of ghosts; not sheeted, church-yard spectres, but the inextinguishable and immortal elements of life, which, having once been, can never die, though they blend and change and change again forever.