Essayists From England

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

"The pretty game of calling on the children of the audience of "Peter Pan" to declare their faith in fairies seemed to me disastrous—a game of men and women at the expense of children, a cumbersome frolic at best and an artificial, a tyrannous use of the adult sense of sentimental humour against the helpless. I could with better conscience use my superior physical strength upon them than exploit them for love of my own condescension. (And yet Sir J. Barrie has written the most adorable "pretending" story ever written about a child.)No, children love a fairy story not because they think it true, but because they think it untrue, and because it makes no fraudulent appeal to their excellent good sense. That sense they are delighted to put aside while they "pretend." That is their own word.[…] "Let's pretend," not "Let's believe." Their mother does not put "Let's pretend" into the child's mouth; she finds it there. Without it there is no play. But the pretending is always drama and never deception or self-deception."

"What else, indeed, should mediocrity be but widespread, anywhere?"

"Flocks of the memories of the day draw near The dovecote doors of sleep."

"[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."

"From the shaken tower A flock of bells take flight And go with the hour."

"Solitude is separate experience."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"London visibly works at nothing but transformation."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as children are they would yet find so many things at table to be detestable."

"Childhood is but change made gay and visible."

"[I]t would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like rhetoric and the arts, a habit."

"[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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide, Like all created things, secrets from me, And stand a barrier to eternity."

"O daisy mine, what will it be to look From God's side even of such a simple thing?"

"Rome in the ages, dimmed with all her towers, Floats in the midst, a little cloud at tether."

"Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn, Unseen, this colourless sky of folded showers, And folded winds; no blossom in the bowers; A poet's face asleep in this grey morn. Now in the midst of the old world forlorn A mystic child is set in these still hours. I keep this time, even before the flowers, Sacred to all the young and the unborn."

"For you knew not it was I, And I knew not it was you. We have learnt, as days went by. But a flower struck root and grew Underground, and no one knew."

"If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind."

"[N]o mirror keeps its glances."

"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."

"My heart shall be thy garden. Come, my own,  Into thy garden; thine be happy hours Among my fairest thoughts, my tallest flowers,  From root to crowning petal thine alone."