Historical Novelists

"We are apt to be angry with this cruel hardness in our life—this unflinching regularity in the smaller wheels and meaner mechanism of the human machine, which knows no stoppage or cessation, though the mainspring be forever hollow, and the hands pointing to purposeless figures on a shattered dial."

"Let any man make a calculation of his existence, subtracting the hours in which he has been thoroughly happy—really and entirely at his ease, without one arriere pensée to mar his enjoyment—without the most infinitesimal cloud to overshadow the brightness of his horizon. Let him do this, and surely he will laugh in utter bitterness of soul when he sets down the sum of his felicity, and discovers the pitiful smallness of the amount. He will have enjoyed himself for a week or ten days in thirty years, perhaps. In thirty years of dull December, and blustering March, and showery April, and dark November weather, there may have been seven or eight glorious August days, through which the sun has blazed in cloudless radiance, and the summer breezes have breathed perpetual balm. How fondly we recollect these solitary days of pleasure, and hope for their recurrence, and try to plan the circumstances that made them bright; and arrange, and predestinate, and diplomatize with fate for a renewal of the remembered joy. As if any joy could ever be built up out of such and such constituent parts! As if happiness were not essentially accidental—a bright and wandering bird, utterly irregular in its migrations; with us one summer's day, and forever gone from us on the next!"

"There were many beautiful vipers in those days and she was one of them."

"He went in search of that honored kinsman with God knows how heavy a weight of anguish at his heart, for he knew he was about to shatter the day-dream of his uncle's life; and he knew that our dreams are none the less terrible to lose, because they have never been the realities for which we have mistaken them."

"Who has not been, or is not to be mad in some lonely hour of life? Who is quite safe from the trembling of the balance?"

"If there had been any one to take this lonely girl in hand and organize her education, Heaven only knows what might have been made of her; but there was no friendly finger to point a pathway in the intellectual forest, and Isabel rambled as her inclination led her, now setting up one idol, now superseding him by another; living as much alone as if she had resided in a balloon, for ever suspended in mid air, and never coming down in serious earnest to the common joys and sorrows of the vulgar life about her."

"I consider any man a fool who allows himself to be captivated by a pretty face."

"A woman's love is such a capricious thing, and so often bestowed upon the least deserving amongst those who seek it."

""Naught's had, all's spent, when our desire is got without content." I wonder whether the fulfilment of one's heart's desire ever does bring perfect contentment? I think not. There is always something wanting. And if a man comes by his wish basely, there is a taint of poison in the wine of life that neutralizes all its sweetness."

"He was a very gracious and communicative person, and seemed to take life in an easy agreeable manner, like a man whose habit it was to look on the brighter side of all things, provided his own comfort was secured."

"That he will haunt the footsteps of his enemy after death is the one revenge which a dying man can promise himself; and if men had power thus to avenge themselves the earth would be peopled with phantoms."

"You appreciate his goodness, perhaps; but you don't appreciate him. You just tolerate him because he is good and kind to you, and works like a galley-slave to insure your welfare in the future; but if he could read 'Victor Hugo' like a play-actor and make an idiot of himself about Mendelssohn, you’d adore him."

"As he sat in the deep embrasure of a mullioned window, talking to my lady, his mind wandered away to shady Figtree Court, and he thought of poor George Talboys smoking his solitary cigar in the room with the birds and canaries."

"She had been told too often of her beauty not to know that she was handsomer than the majority of women. She knew that in mental power she was her lover's equal: by birth, by fortune, by every attribute and quality, she was fitted to be his wife, to rule over his household, and to be a purifying and elevating influence in his life. His mother had loved her as warmly as it was possible for that languid nature to love anything. Their two lives were interwoven by the tenderest associations of the past as well as the solemn engagement that bound them in the present. No, it was not possible for Madoline, seeing all things from the standpoint of her own calm and evenly-balanced mind, to imagine infidelity in a lover so long and so closely bound to her. Those sudden aberrations of the human mind which wreck so many lives, and make men and women a world's wonder, had never come within the range of her experience."

""You have a corpse there, my friends?" "Yes; a corpse washed ashore an hour ago." "Drowned?" "Yes, drowned; — a young girl, very handsome." "Suicides are always handsome," he says; and then he stands for a little while idly smoking and meditating, looking at the sharp outline of the corpse and the stiff folds of the rough canvas covering. Life is such a golden holiday to him young, ambitious, clever — that it seems as though sorrow and death could have no part in his destiny."

"He was a student — such things as happened to him, happen sometimes to students. He was a German — such things as happened to him, happen sometimes to Germans. He was young, handsome, studious, enthusiastic, metaphysical, reckless, unbelieving, heartless. And being young, handsome, and eloquent he was beloved."

""The Lord gave, and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord." We repeated the holy sentences of resignation; but it was not resignation, it was despair that subdued the violence of our grief."

"The disease which was undermining Lady Cecil’s moral constitution was not sorrow; it was only the absence of joy."

"I was three-and-thirty years of age. Youth was quite gone; beauty I had never possessed; and I was content to think of myself as a confirmed old maid, a quiet spectator of life's great drama, disturbed by no feverish desire for an active part in the play."

"There was a gay wedding a year ago at Compton church, and very grand and very handsome everything was; and sure the bride looked very lovely; but one thing was wrong, and that was the bridegroom."

"I am no believer in visions or omens. After all, I would sooner fancy that I was dreaming – dreaming with my eyes open as I stood at the window – than that I beheld the shadows of the dead."

"The past is all forgiven long ago, dear Ringwood," said his sister earnestly; "it would be ill for brother and sister if the love between them could not outlive old injuries, and be the brighter and the truer for old sorrows."

"Why, I can't help smiling at people, and speaking prettily to them. I know I'm no better than the rest of the world; but I can't help it if I'm pleasanter. It's constitutional."

"He had an honest abhorrence of work and regimen of all kinds. He sometimes thought that he ought to have been created a butterfly without having been obliged to endure the laborious preliminary stages of caterpillar and chrysalis."

"And then came a long interregnum devoted to the arts and mysteries of the toilet."

"I delay so long, because I fear; because my whole life hangs in balance on a single word; because what I have near me now may never more be near me after, though more than all the world, or than a thousand worlds, to me."

"Whenever I wandered in the streets, what with the noise the people made, the number of the coaches, the running of the footmen, the swaggering of great courtiers, and the thrusting aside of everybody, many and many a time I longed to be back among the sheep again, for fear of losing temper."

"It seemed to me that if the lawyers failed to do their duty, they ought to pay people for waiting upon them, instead of making them pay for it."

"Either love me not at all, or as I love you for ever."

"The love of all things was upon me, and a softness to them all, and a sense of having something even such as they had."

"Having no knowledge of these great men, nor of the matter how far it was true, I had not very much to say about either of them or it; but this silence was not shared (although the ignorance may have been) by the hundreds of people around me."

"May be we are not such fools as we look. But though we be, we are well content, so long as we may be two fools together."

"It might have been a good thing for me to have had a father to beat these rovings out of me; or a mother to make a home, and teach me how to manage it. For, being left with none—I think; and nothing ever comes of it. Nothing, I mean, which I can grasp and have with any surety; nothing but faint images, and wonderment, and wandering."

"I cannot go through all my thoughts so as to make them clear to you, nor have I ever dwelt on things, to shape a story of them. I know not where the beginning was, nor where the middle ought to be, nor even how at the present time I feel, or think, or ought to think. If I look for help to those around me, who should tell me right and wrong (being older and much wiser), I meet sometimes with laughter, and at other times with anger."

"Often too I wonder at the odds of fortune, which made me (helpless as I am, and fond of peace and reading) the heiress of this mad domain, the sanctuary of unholiness."

"Too late we know the good from bad; the knowledge is no pleasure then; being memory's medicine rather than the wine of hope."

"“I think, Master Ridd, you cannot know,” she said, with her eyes taken from me, “what the dangers of this place are, and the nature of the people.” “Yes, I know enough of that; and I am frightened greatly, all the time, when I do not look at you.”"

"There was that power all round, that power and that goodness, which make us come, as it were, outside our bodily selves, to share them. Over and beside us breathes the joy of hope and promise; under foot are troubles past; in the distance bowering newness tempts us ever forward. We quicken with largesse of life, and spring with vivid mystery."

"All the beauty of the spring went for happy men to think of; all the increase of the year was for other eyes to mark. Not a sign of any sunrise for me from my fount of life, not a breath to stir the dead leaves fallen on my heart's Spring."

"On the right-hand side was a mighty oven, where Betty threatened to bake us; and on the left, long sides of bacon, made of favoured pigs, and growing very brown and comely. Annie knew the names of all, and ran up through the wood-smoke, every now and then, when a gentle memory moved her, and asked them how they were getting on, and when they would like to be eaten. Then she came back with foolish tears, at thinking of that necessity; and I, being soft in a different way, would make up my mind against bacon. But, Lord bless you! it was no good. Whenever it came to breakfast-time, after three hours upon the moors, I regularly forgot the pigs, but paid good heed to the rashers."

"Least said soonest mended, because less chance of breaking."

"But during those two months of fog (for we had it all the winter), the saddest and the heaviest thing was to stand beside the sea. To be upon the beach yourself, and see the long waves coming in; to know that they are long waves, but only see a piece of them; and to hear them lifting roundly, swelling over smooth green rocks, plashing down in the hollow corners, but bearing on all the same as ever, soft and sleek and sorrowful, till their little noise is over."

"“Now let us bandy words no more,” said mother, very sweetly; “nothing is easier than sharp words, except to wish them unspoken.”"

"Soon we found Peggy and Smiler in company, well embarked on the homeward road, and victualling where the grass was good. Right glad they were to see us again—not for the pleasure of carrying, but because a horse (like a woman) lacks, and is better without, self-reliance."

"I for my part was nothing loth, and preferred to see London by daylight. And after all, it was not worth seeing, but a very hideous and dirty place, not at all like Exmoor."

"There is nothing in this world to fear, nothing to revere or trust, nothing even to hope for; least of all, is there aught to love."

"In the hour of death, after this life’s whim, When the heart beats low, and the eyes grow dim, And pain has exhausted every limb— The lover of the Lord shall trust in Him. For even the purest delight may pall, And power must fail, and the pride must fall, And the love of the dearest friends grow small— But the glory of the Lord is all in all."

"But whatever lives or dies, business must be attended to; and the principal business of good Christians is, beyond all controversy, to fight with one another."

"But now, at Dulverton, we dined upon the rarest and choicest victuals that ever I did taste. Even now, at my time of life, to think of it gives me appetite, as once and awhile to think of my first love makes me love all goodness. Hot mutton pasty was a thing I had often heard of from very wealthy boys and men, who made a dessert of dinner; and to hear them talk of it made my lips smack, and my ribs come inwards."

"It is the manner of all good boys to be careless of apparel, and take no pride in adornment."