Works By Letitia Elizabeth Landon

"Who ever said one-half of all that seemed in absence so easy to say ?"

"Life is made up of vanities — so small, So mean, the common history of the day, — That mockery seems the sole philosophy. Then some stern truth starts up — cold, sudden, strange; And we are taught what life is by despair : — The toys, the trifles, and the petty cares, Melt into nothingness — we know their worth ; The heart avenges every careless thought, And makes us feel that fate is terrible."

"But there always is in my mind something at once ludicrous and mournful in a crowd congregated for the purpose of amusement. What discontent, what vanity, move the complicated wheels of the social machine! There are many pleasures that one can comprehend, and even go the length of admitting, that they are worth some trouble in endeavouring to obtain; but the mania of filling your house with guests of whom you know little, and for whom you care nothing, is only less incomprehensible than why they should be at the trouble of coming to you."

"[From Lady Marchmont’s journal]: Will the time ever come, when men will feel that the mind and the heart must work in concert, and that we must look around and afar for our happiness ; that our great mistake has been, the narrow circle to which we are content to limit good ?"

"We might have been !—these are but common words, And yet they make the sum of life's bewailing;"

"… if there be one torture which the demons, who delight in human misery, might, rejoice to inflict, it is the anxious suspense of love acting upon an imaginative temperament. It is extraordinary the power of creation with which the mind seems suddenly endowed, and only to suppose the worst. Death, sickness, crime, misfortune,—these are the images which start upon the solitude made fearful with their presence."

"It is a weary and a bitter hour When first the real disturbs the poet's world, And he distrusts the future. Not for that Should cold despondency weigh down the soul It is a glorious gift, bright poetry, And should be thankfully and nobly used. Let it look up to heaven !"

"The moonlight falleth lovely over earth ; And strange, indeed, must be the mind of man That can resist its beautiful reproach. How can hate work like fever in the soul With such entire tranquillity around? Evil must be our nature to refuse Such gentle intercession."

"How many beautiful creations, how many glorious dreams went with him to the tomb ! but the unfulfilled destiny of genius is a mystery whose solution is not of earth. It is but one of those many voices wandering in this wilderness of ours that tell us, not here is our lot appointed to finish. We are here but for a space and a season ; for a task and a trial, and of the end no man knoweth. The earthly immortality of the mind is but a type of the heavenly immortality of the soul."

"No one dies but some one is glad of it."

"To find that you have been deceived, where you trusted so entirely ; trifled with, where all your deepest and sweetest emotions had been called into life, is the most acute—the most enduring sorrow of which that life is capable."

"[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."

"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!"

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

"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."

"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 ;"

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

"[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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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 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."

"[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."

"[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 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.""

"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."

"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."

"… 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."

"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."

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

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

"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 ?"

"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."

"A great sorrow forgets every thing but itself; but little sorrows exaggerate themselves and each other."

"Hard are life's early steps; and but that youth Is buoyant, confident, and strong in hope, Men would behold its threshold, and despair."

"[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."

"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."

"[From Lady Mary Wortley Montague within Lady Marchmont’s letters]: Friendship is just an innocent delusion, to round a period in a moral essay."

"The first step towards establishing pretensions of any kind, is to believe firmly in them yourself: faith is very catching, and half the beauty-reputations of which I hear have originated with the possessors."