Children S Authors

"I came home for ever!"

"The flouting infidel doth mock when Christians cry"

"Who first invented work, and bound the free And holiday-rejoicing spirit down . . . . . . . . . To that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood? . . . . . . . . . Sabbath-less Satan!"

"Fanny Kelly's divine plain face."

"I am determined my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is."

"[Of Coleridge] His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged."

"This very night I am going to leave off Tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realized."

"Any thing awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral."

"A good-natured woman...which is as much as you can expect from a friend's wife, whom you got acquainted with a bachelor."

"Gone before To that unknown and silent shore."

"Nursed amid her [London's] noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes?"

"The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street."

"Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life."

"Severe and saintly righteousness Composed the clear white bridal dress; Jesus, the Son of Heaven's high King Bought with his blood the marriage ring"

"Please to blot out gentle hearted, and substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-ey'd, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the Gentleman in question."

"For God's sake (I never was more serious), don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print."

"I have had playmates, I have had companions, In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days— All, all are gone, the old familiar faces."

"Atheists, or Deists only in the name, By word or deed deny a God. They eat Their daily bread, & draw the breath of heaven, Without a thought or thanks; heav'n's roof to them Is but a painted ceiling hung with lamps, No more, that light them to their purposes. They 'wander loose about.' They nothing see, Themselves except, and creatures like themselves, That liv'd short-sighted, impotent to save. So on their dissolute spirits, soon or late, Destruction cometh 'like an armed man,' Or like a dream of murder in the night, Withering their mortal faculties, & breaking The bones of all their pride."

"I read your letters with my sister, and they give us both abundance of delight. Especially they please us two, when you talk in a religious strain,—not but we are offended occasionally with a certain freedom of expression, a certain air of mysticism, more consonant to the conceits of pagan philosophy, than consistent with the humility of genuine piety. To instance now in your last letter—you say, “it is by the press [sic], that God hath given finite spirits both evil and good (I suppose you mean simply bad men and good men), a portion as it were of His Omnipresence!” Now, high as the human intellect comparatively will soar, and wide as its influence, malign or salutary, can extend, is there not, Coleridge, a distance between the Divine Mind and it, which makes such language blasphemy? Again, in your first fine consolatory epistle you say, “you are a temporary sharer in human misery, that you may be an eternal partaker of the Divine Nature.” What more than this do those men say, who are for exalting the man Christ Jesus into the second person of an unknown Trinity,—men, whom you or I scruple not to call idolaters? Man, full of imperfections, at best, and subject to wants which momentarily remind him of dependence; man, a weak and ignorant being, “servile” from his birth “to all the skiey influences,” with eyes sometimes open to discern the right path, but a head generally too dizzy to pursue it; man, in the pride of speculation, forgetting his nature, and hailing in himself the future God, must make the angels laugh. Be not angry with me, Coleridge; I wish not to cavil; I know I cannot instruct you; I only wish to remind you of that humility which best becometh the Christian character. God, in the New Testament (our best guide), is represented to us in the kind, condescending, amiable, familiar light of a parent: and in my poor mind ’tis best for us so to consider of Him, as our heavenly Father, and our best Friend, without indulging too bold conceptions of His nature. Let us learn to think humbly of ourselves, and rejoice in the appellation of “dear children,” “brethren,” and “co-heirs with Christ of the promises,” seeking to know no further...God love us all, and may He continue to be the father and the friend of the whole human race!"

"I have something more to do than to feel."

"MY dearest friend — White or some of my friends or the public papers by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines. My poor dear dearest sister in a fit of insanity has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a mad house, from whence I fear she must be moved to an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses, — I eat and drink and sleep, and have my judgment I believe very sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt. Mr. Norris of the Bluecoat school has been very very kind to us, and we have no other friend, but thank God I am very calm and composed, and able to do the best that remains to do. Write, —as religious a letter as possible— but no mention of what is gone and done with. —With me “the former things are passed away,” and I have something more to do that [than] to feel. God almighty have us all in his keeping."

"In heav'n, the saint nor pity feels, nor care, For those thus sentenced - pity might disturb The delicate sense and most divine repose Of spiritus angelical Blessed be God, The measure of his judgments is not fixed By man's erroneous standard. He discerns No such inordinate difference and vast Betwixt the sinner and the saint, to doom Such disproportion'd fates. Compared with him, No man on earth is holy called: they best Stand in his sight approved, who at his feet Their little crowns of virtue cast, and yield, To him of his own works the praise, his due."

"Cultivate simplicity or rather should I say banish elaborateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the heart."

"Oaths fell from his mouth with a gentleness and sweetness which the blessings of other men cannot reach. His essays of Elia are full of this bright humour, this tender criticism. A ripple of tender laughter rips through them, just broke here and there by a sob."

"Surely it is a matter of joy, that your faith in Jesus has been preserved; the Comforter that should relieve you is not far from you. But as you are a Christian, in the name of that Saviour, who was filled with bitterness and made druken with wormwood, I conjre you to have recourse in frequent prayer to 'his God and your God,' the God of mercies, and father of all comfort. Your poor father is, I hope, almost senseless of the calamity; the unconscious instrument of Divine Providence knows it not, and your mother is in heaven."

"The mixture spoils two good things, as Charles Lamb (Elia) used to say of brandy and water."

"I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself."

"A man can never have too much Time to himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I would christen him Nothing-To-Do; he should do nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the life contemplative."

"Sunday itself—that unfortunate failure of a holyday as it too often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it ..."

"Each day used to be individually felt by me in its reference to the foreign post days; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my Saturday nights' sensations."

"I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true time, which a man can properly call his own, that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people's time, not his. The remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least multiplied for me three-fold. My ten next years, if I stretch so far, will be as long as any preceding thirty."

"From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me."

"If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life—thy shining youth—in the irksome confinement of an office; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance."

"The good things of life are not to be had singly, but come to us with a mixture."

"A presentation copy...is a copy of a book whoch does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it; for which, if a stranger, he only demands your friendship; if a brother author, he expects from you a book of yours, which does not sell, in return."

"A pun is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect."

"Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it."

"How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! he is his own exclusive object. Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty."

"Books which are no books."

"The writer of modern times who seems to us most like the "simple great ones gone," Robert Louis Stevenson, owes much of his excellence to his modesty in being subject to restraint and his good sense in burdening himself with no partial doctrines to expound."

"Never had beauty been so forgotten; style was poisoned at the fount of thought by Carlyle, whose sentences were confused disasters like railway accidents, and by Herbert Spencer, who wrote as though he were the offspring of two Times leaders; among novelists only Robert Louis Stevenson loved words, and he had too prudent a care to water down his gruel to suit sick England's stomach."

""True success is to labor," you said./Though you died at forty-four,/who does more than what you did?/Making pages that would live so long... islands/as treasures.../human lives as treasures../you took a deep breath,/opened your packet of cheese and fruit, curled into/the words."

"Truth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain."

"Keats, entirely a stranger to error, could believe that the nightingale enchanting him was the same one Ruth heard amid the alien corn of Bethlehem in Judah; Stevenson posits a single bird that consumes the centuries: "the nightingale that devours time." Schopenhauer — impassioned, lucid Schopenhauer — provides a reason: the pure corporeal immediacy in which animals live, oblivious to death and memory. He then adds, not without a smile: Whoever hears me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one."

"; instead, ."

"The commonplaces are the great poetic truths."

"The world was not made for us; it was made for ten hundred millions of men, all different from each other and from us; there's no royal road there, we just have to sclamber and tumble."

"To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life; and perhaps only in law and the higher mathematics may this devotion be maintained, suffice to itself without reaction, and find continual rewards without excitement."

"Ice and iron cannot be welded."

"And no doubt it is easy thus to circumvent a child with catchwords, but it may be questioned how far it is effectual. An instinct in his breast detects the quibble, and a voice condemns it. He will instantly submit, privately hold the same opinion. For even in this simple and antique relation of the mother and the child, hypocrisies are multiplied."