Literary Works

"I can understand the feeling of the duellist when really fierce and bitter—there are injuries only to be washed out in blood ; but I have always thought, that the seconds must, or ought, to feel very uncomfortable. They stand by in cold blood to watch the glittering steel, whose shimmer may every moment be quenched in blood. If the eye be dropped for an instant, the next it may look on death, and death in its most fearful shape—one human being dying by the rage, the evil passion, or the unforgivable fault of another."

"[From Lord Norbourne]: I do not often give advice ; first, because it is a bad habit that of giving any thing ; and, secondly, because I always think of the ambassador’s answer to Oliver's declaration, 'that if the court of Spain cut off his head, he would send them the heads of every Spaniard in his dominions.’ 'Yes, please your highness,' returned the diplomatist, 'but among them all there may not be one to fit my shoulders.' In like manner, with all our choice of other people’s experience, there is never any that suits us but our own."

"I believe that one great reason why the suffering of the mind is so often followed by suffering of the body is, that we are so indifferent about it, that we do not care to take even those ordinary precautions which are taken almost unconsciously in general. There is nothing in life worth attention, not even ourselves."

"Change is the universal prescription for a wounded spirit. " It will do you so much good," is the constant remark. Perhaps it may; but how reluctant is any one who is suffering mentally, to try it! There is an irritation about secret and subdued sorrow, which peculiarly unfits you for exertion ; you are discontented with all that is around you, and yet you shrink from alteration ; it is too much trouble ; you do not feel in yourself even energy enough for the ordinary demands of life."

"Walter was wrong ; but I own I tremble at the fatality which sometimes seems to hang over our slightest actions. How often do we find ourselves involved in sudden misery and unhappiness, by circumstances over which we have no control ! and we ask bitterly ; "What have I done to deserve this ?" Not in this world will be the answer!"

"[From Walter Maynard]: What a folly are our own exertions ; every thing depends upon a lucky chance in this world !"

"[From Norbourne Courtenaye]: You cannot doubt that influence: from our veriest infancy we feed upon the thoughts of the dead ; even your own strong and original mind has been cultivated by others. I never enter a library without being grateful to those whose moral existence has formed my own. Our sages, our poets, have left a world behind, formed of all that is good, beautiful, and true in our own. Not a life but owes to them some of its happiest hours ; they are our favourites, our old, familiar friends."

"[From Norbourne Courtenaye]: … all great discoveries have been the result of single endeavour."

"We may, we ought, to be merciful to others ; to ourselves, we should be only just."

"… nothing can supply the place of strong, undeviating principle. There is but one wrong, and one right ;"

"[From Lady Marchmont’s journal]: What a mistake to build our hopes on the external vanities of life! circumstance is nothing. How worthless, now appears to me, all that once seemed the chief objects of existence! our happiness lies within."

"But in ourself is Fate's worst minister: There is no wretchedness like self-reproach."

"The affection of family ties has the character on it of childhood in which it was formed ; it is free, open, confiding; it has none of the delicacy of friendship, or the romance of sentiment : you know that success ought to be in common, and that you have but one interest."

"Sooner or later a woman must inevitably despise the man who takes money from her. Before a man can do this, there must be those radical defects of character to which even kindness cannot always be blind. He must be a moral coward, because he exposes her to those annoyances which he has not courage enough to face himself; he must be mean, because he submits to an obligation from the inferior and the weak; and he must be ungrateful, because ingratitude is the necessary consequence of receiving favours of which we are ashamed. Money is the great breaker-up of love and friendship ;"

"I have been writing all my life, and even now I do not understand the faculty of composition ; but this I do know, that the history of the circumstances under which most books are written would be a frightful picture of human suffering. How often is the pen taken up when the hand is unsteady with recent sickness, and bodily pain is struggled against, and sometimes in vain ! How often is the page written hurriedly and anxiously,—the mind fevered the while by the consciousness that it is not doing justice to its powers!"

"[From Walter Maynard]: … the epigrams uttered over champagne are like the wreaths the Egyptians flung on the Nile, they float away, the gods alone know whither."

"It is said that ridicule is the test of truth : it is never applied, but when we wish to deceive ourselves ; when, if we cannot exclude the light, we are fain to draw a curtain before it. The sneer springs out of the wish to deny ; and wretched must be the state of that mind which desires to take refuge in doubt! But the instinct of right and wrong is immutable ; all other voices may be silenced, but not that in ourselves."

"—one woman—always knows how to plague another;"

"[From Lady Mary Wortley Montague]: Love is society’s Alexander the Great, only intent on making conquests ; and we care for no captives but those who follow the track of our triumphs in chains.""

"[From Lady Mary Wortley Montague]: We might have had hearts in our cradles ; but, as I don't pretend to remember mine, I cannot say. Perhaps at sixteen, too, there is a sort of imagination of one ; but it is a phantom which flits at the cockcrowing of reality. We soon learn, 'That the worth of any thing is just as much as it will bring :’ and we value a lover by the estimate of others, not by our own. Our own suffrage is nothing."

"Amid the many contrasts produced by our forced unions of nature and art, there is no contrast so strange as that between the exterior and the internal world of society."

"[From Lady Marchmont’s journal]: … I hate the word "ought"—it always implies something dull, cold, and commonplace. The "ought nots" of life are its pleasantest things."

"[From Lady Marchmont’s journal]: There are some people who ought never to dream of commonplacing the ideal with themselves. The world of the heart is essentially ideal : it collects all poetry,—innate and acquired ; it is fastidious, dreaming, and delicate; and is a question of taste as well as of feeling ; and it is to this world that love belongs. It should be kept as far apart from lower life as that mysterious world of stars and clouds on which I am now gazing."

"[From Lady Marchmont’s journal]: Really, being in love appears a pleasant state of existence ; it is always agreeable to know that there is another thinking of you, whether you think of them or not. I like the idea of there being one individual leaving your room who will bear away every look you have given, every word you have said,—it gives importance to them in your own eyes ; and yet I have often marvelled what people see in each other. Even as a book is read through, people are talked through."

"Of all habits, that of writing down your thoughts and feelings, is one of the most difficult to abandon."

"… of all duties, forgetfulness is the hardest to fulfil. The very effort to forget teaches us to remember."

"I never could enter into the passion for china; it is an affection born of ostentation. Those stiff shepherdesses ; those ill-shaped teapots ; those monsters, which take every shape but a graceful one ; those little, round cups make no appeal to my imagination; they suggest nothing but ideas of trade ; they are redolent of the auction-room. Moreover, I detest bargains ; the bargain can only be one, because either the first purchaser is dead, or ruined. He has left either heirs or creditors, each equally greedy, careless, and impatient or, if these toys be disposed of during a lifetime, such sale only tells a common tale of, first extravagance, then want ; fancies indulged thoughtlessly, to end miserably. A bargain is a social evil ; one man's loss, tempting another man's cupidity."

"Not to the present is our hour confined, The great and shadowy future is assigned To be the glorious empire of the mind. The past was once the future and it wrought In the high presence of on-looking thought; All that we have, was by its efforts brought. To-day creates to-morrow, and the tree Of good or ill grows in past hours, what we Make for the future— certain is to be."

"[From Sir George Kingston]: Poets lay it down as a rule, that deities are not to extricate a hero from his embarrassment unless there remain no human method of extricating him."

"It matters not its history—Love has wings, Like lightning, swift and fatal : and it springs, Like a wild flower, where it is least expected; Existing whether cherished or rejected."

"… the absurdity of your husband comes too close for laughter, it may reflect a little on yourself—at all events on your taste for choosing him."

"Nothing more strongly marks the insufficiency of luxuries than the ease with which people grow accustomed to them; they are rather known by their want than by their presence. The word "blasé" has been coined expressly for the use of the upper classes."

"Villas are, I believe, a delightful invention of the Romans, who set very seriously about enjoying the world they had conquered. … The climate and the scenery of England are admirably adapted to the perfection of a villa. The great charm of our landscapes is their colouring—so quiet, yet so refreshing. The fine old trees, and the fine old tree standing by itself, are peculiar to our fields ; the rich sweep of grass so vividly green, the prodigality of garden flowers, and a sky whose intense blue owes the depth of its purple to the white clouds which float above in broken masses,—all these belong to a style of natural beauty which is entirely English."

"Old age comes on feeble, and often premature, when his place of refuge is a straw pallet, where, if his family keep him, it is an act of Roman virtue, the very devotion of duty and affection ; for even the old man's morsel must be taken from their own. But the workhouse is the ordinary resting-place before the grave ; and there human selfishness takes its most revolting aspect ; there life has not left one illusion, one affection : all is harsh, cold, revolting, and unnatural. The difference that began in the cradle continues to the tomb. The bare coffin, a few boards hastily nailed together, is flung into the earth ; the service is hurried over, the ground trodden down, and the next day the children are playing upon the new grave, whose tenant is already forgotten. So much for the equality of human existence."

"Suppose such a childhood past : it has escaped disease; no chance chill has distorted the youthful limbs, they have, at least, health to begin life. The poor man has nothing more than his strength. God's best gifts lie dormant within him : the chances are that he cannot read even the holy page, that, at least, holds out the hope of a less miserable world. He has not that mental cultivation which alone teaches us what are our resources, and how to husband or to exert them. He knows only how to labour, and that not in the most serviceable manner to himself. He does not, even when he can, which is rare enough, lay by for the future, because he has never been accustomed to reflect. Life has for him no future. Perhaps he takes to drinking ; and it is easy, with half-a-dozen different kinds of French wines on the table, the claret purple beside the golden sherry, to say a thousand true and excellent things on the crime of excess. If the gentleman refrains, it is from a moral restraint the poor man has never been taught to exercise ; and what does the poor man drink to avoid—cold, hunger, perhaps bodily pain—always bodily weariness ?"

"Take the reverse of the picture. The infancy of the poor child is one of cries, too often of blows ; natural affection has given way before the iron pressure of want. The old proverb, that, "When poverty comes in at the door, love flies out at the window," is true in a far more general sense than the one in which it is generally applied. They have the floor for a bed ; the scant and mouldering remnant of food for dinner ; the cold hearth, where the wind blows in the snow ;—these physical sufferings react on the moral world, they deaden and embitter the sweetest of our feelings. The parent half loves, half loathes, the child that takes the bread from his own mouth ; and the child looks on that as tyranny, which is only misery. It learns to fear before it learns to love."

"The child of the rich man sleeps in the silken cradle, his little cries are hushed by the nurse, whose only duty is to watch the progress of that tiny frame. The least illness, and the physician bestows on the infant heir the knowledge of a life ; for every single patient benefits by all his predecessors. The child becomes a boy : Eton or Westminster, Oxford or Cambridge, have garnered for his sake the wisdom of centuries : he is launched into public life, and there are friends and connexions on either hand, as stepping-stones in his way. He arrives at old age : the armchair is ready, and the old port has been long in the cellars of his country-house to share its strength with its master. He dies ; his very coffin is comfortable ; the very vault of his ancestors is sheltered ; a funeral sermon is preached in his honour ; and escutcheon and marble tablet do their best to preserve his memory."

"There is no denying that there are "royal roads" through existence for the upper classes; for them, at least, the highways are macadamized, swept, and watered. They are surrounded not only by luxuries, but by pleasures, which, at all events to the young, must have the zest of novelty. It seems to me the veriest fallacy to say that the lots in life are weighed out in equal balances : the difference is very great—to the examiner, sad ; and to the sufferer, bitter ! Before we talk of equality of pain, which is, in nine cases out often, only a selfish and indolent excuse for neglect, let us contrast a high and a low position together. On one side is protection, instruction, and pleasure ; on the other is neglect, ignorance and hardship. Here, wants are invented to become luxuries ; there, “hunger swallows all in one low want." Among the rich, body and mind are cultivated with equal watchfulness ; among the poor, the body is left to disease and to decrepitude, and the mind to void and destruction. I grant that I speak of the two extremes ; but it is the worst ill of social existence that there should be such extremes."

"Few, save the poor, feel for the poor; The rich know not, how hard It is to be of needful food And needful rest debarred."

"[From Lord Norbourne]: … what have I done for you to presuppose such a want of gallantry, as to imagine that I would attempt to guess a lady's secret before she thought proper to communicate it ?"

"[From Lord Norbourne in reply]: Half the misery in this life originates in its falsehood. We conceal our thoughts and our feelings, till, even to ourselves, they become confused ; and half our time is spent in fretting and feverish attempts to disentangle the webs we have woven : and the strange thing is, that all this dissimulation is unnecessary ; we should have done far better without it."

"[From Lady Marchmont]: We contradict each other; still more do we contradict ourselves. It seems to me as if there were a perpetual warfare going on between the outward and the inner world. Nothing is really what it appears to be ; and this is what discourages me more than I can express—the not knowing to what I may trust, and my utter inability to discern between that which is; and that which only seems."

"Ah, we never know how dearly we loved our friends until the grave has closed over them."

"Life is so little in its vanities, So mean, and looking to such worthless aim, Truly the dust, of which we are a part, Predominates amid mortality. Great crimes have something of nobility; Mighty their warning, vast is their remorse : But these small faults, that make one-half of life Belong to lowest natures and reduce To their own wretched level nobler things."

"... no woman likes anybody but herself to depreciate a lover; it is personally an ill compliment."

"Now, nothing is more provoking to a woman than a lover's infidelity ; it is a wrong which leaves her without even the satisfaction of revenge. His very infidelity shows that she has lost her power ; and without power, where is revenge ?"

"It is strange what society will endure from its idols."

"Youth has one delightful time, when hope walks, like an angel, at its side, and all things have their freshness and their charm. There appears so much to enjoy, that the only question is, what to enjoy first ?"

"And yet it is a wasted heart : It is a wasted mind That seeks not in the inner world Its happiness to find ; For happiness is like the bird That broods above its nest, And finds beneath its folded wings, Life's dearest, and its best."

"Tis a fair tree, the almond-tree : there Spring Shews the first promise of her rosy wreath; Or ere the green leaves venture from the bud, Those fragile blossoms light the winter bough With delicate colours, heralding the rose. Whose own Aurora they might seem to be. What lurks beneath their faint and lovely red ? What the dark spirit in those fairy flowers ? Tis death !"