Activists From England

"She walks—the lady of my delight—  A shepherdess of sheep. Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white;  She guards them from the steep; She feeds them on the fragrant height,  And folds them in for sleep."

"[A]n English wit has well said that affectation displeases us because it has not too much, but too little, art."

"[F]or man, woman, and child the tender, irregular, sensitive, living foot, which does not even stand with all its little surface on the ground, and which makes no base to satisfy an architectural eye, is, as it were, the unexpected thing.[…] How weak it is may be seen from a footprint: for nothing makes a more helpless and unsymmetrical sign than does a naked foot."

"Tender, too, is the silence of human feet. You have but to pass a season amongst the barefooted to find that man, who, shod, makes so much ado, is naturally as silent as snow. Woman, who not only makes her armed heel heard, but also goes rustling like a shower, is naturally silent as snow."

"To mount a hill is to lift with you something lighter and brighter than yourself or than any meaner burden. You lift the world, you raise the horizon; you give a signal for the distance to stand up."

"[T]he foot should have more of the acquaintance of earth, and know more of flowers, freshness, cool brooks, wild thyme, and salt sand than does anything else about us.[…] It is only the entirely unshod that have lively feet."

"There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a child's foot runs."

"If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds."

"[T]here is nothing so exacting, so difficult, so various, as the consistency of a complete theory, nothing so overwhelming to a slothful student."

"In childhood we all have a more exalted sense of dawn and summer sunrise than we ever fully retain or quite recover; and also a far higher sensibility for April and April evenings—a heartache for them, which in riper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled."

"With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the bells. The inarticulate bell has found too much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature."

"I have known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the whole peal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness made light of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dance in his boots by a merry highwayman."

" With this ambiguous earth His dealings have been told us. These abide: The signal to a maid, the human birth, The lesson, and the young Man crucified."

"Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name."

"London visibly works at nothing but transformation."

"Solitude is separate experience."

"The roads […] fly from the city of confusion.[…] No other road looks so resolute in flight as the rail."

"[I]t is doubtful whether we may name any weak thing as typically spiritual."

"The eyelids confess, and reject, and refuse to reject. They have expressed all things ever since man was man.And they express so much by seeming to hide or to reveal that which indeed expresses nothing. For there is no message from the eye. It has direction, it moves, in the service of the sense of sight; it receives the messages of the world. But expression is outward, and the eye has it not. There are no windows of the soul, there are only curtains."

"There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting out of a child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much confidence."

"Childhood is but change made gay and visible."

"It is not the eye, but the eyelid, that is important, beautiful, eloquent, full of secrets. The eye has nothing but its colour, and all colours are fine within fine eyelids. The eyelid has all the form, all the drawing, all the breadth and length; the square of great eyes irregularly wide; the long corners of narrow eyes; the pathetic outward droop; the delicate contrary suggestion of an upward turn at the outer corner, which Sir Joshua loved."

"We talk of sunshine and moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is yet one of the illuminations of our skies."

"Let a man turn to his own childhood—no further—if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change."

"Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the act."

"A child is beset with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it back—it is already so far."

"Women might be, and were, duly suppressed when, by the mouth of Olympe de Gouges, they claimed a "right to concur in the choice of representatives for the formation of the laws"; but in her person, too, they were liberally allowed to bear political responsibility to the Republic. Olympe de Gouges was guillotined. Robespierre thus made her public and complete amends."

"Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all. Men go in search of it; but the celestial scenery journeys to them; it goes its way round the world. It has no nation, it costs no weariness, it knows no bonds."

"Spring and autumn are inconsiderable events in a landscape compared with the shadows of a cloud."

"In the case of women, it is of the living and unpublished blood that the violent world has professed to be delicate and ashamed. See the curious history of the political rights of women under the Revolution. On the scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the fortunes of party. Political life might be denied her, but that seems a trifle when you consider how generously she was permitted political death. She was to spin and cook for her citizen in the obscurity of her living hours; but to the hour of her death was granted a part in the largest interests, social, national, international. The blood wherewith she should, according to Robespierre, have blushed to be seen or heard in the tribune, was exposed in the public sight unsheltered by her veins."

"Play is not for every hour of the day, or for any hour taken at random. There is a tide in the affairs of children. Civilization is cruel in sending them to bed at the most stimulating time of dusk."

"The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood."

"It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, where Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature."

"The cloud controls the light.[...]It is the cloud that, holding the sun's rays in a sheaf as a giant holds a handful of spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge with a delicate revelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and makes the foreground shine."

"I came from nothing; but from where Come these undying thoughts I bear?"

"  I am dark but fair, Black but fair."

"I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,  I shun the thought that lurks in all delight—  The thought of thee—and in the blind Heaven's height, And in the sweetest passage of a song."

"I make the whole world answer to my art."

"This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the Exhibition of 1851 or thereabouts—the pleasure in this particular form of human disgrace—has passed, leaving one trace only: the habit by which some men reproach a silly woman though her sex, whereas a silly man is not reproached through his sex."

"But, visiting Sea, your love doth press  And reach in further than you know,  And fills all these, and when you go, There's loneliness in loneliness."

"I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart."

"A poet of one mood in all my lays,  Ranging all life to sing my only love,  Like a west wind across the world I move, Sweeping my harp of floods mine own wild way."

"Hamlet, being a little mad, feigned madness. It is when I am angry that I pretend to be angry, so as to present the truth in an obvious and intelligible form."

"The majority can tell ordinary truth, but they should not trust themselves for truth extraordinary."

"[R]ight language enlarges the soul as no other power or influence may do."

"In the case of the woman's figure it is the foot, with its extreme proportional smallness, that gives the precious instability, the spring and balance that are so organic."

"The worst of all reasons for continuing anything is that it is easily continuable."

"[T]here is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be mortal."

" But in the eternities, Doubtless we shall compare together, hear A million alien Gospels, in what guise He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear."

"Red has been praised for its nobility as the colour of life. But the true colour of life is not red. Red is the colour of violence, or of life broken open, edited, and published. Or if red is indeed the colour of life, it is so only on condition that it is not seen. Once fully visible, red is the colour of life violated, and in the act of betrayal and of waste."