Ouida Quotes

Intensely selfish people are always very decided as to what they wish. They do not waste their energies in considering the good of others.

I do not wish to be a coward like the father of mankind and throw the blame upon a woman.

Woman's fatal weakness is to desire sympathy and comprehension. --"Wanda

I only care for the subjective life; I am very German, you see: The woods interest me, and the world does not.

One must pray first, but afterwards one must help oneself. God does not care for cowards. --"Wanda

What we love once, we love forever. Shall there be joy in heaven over those who repent, yet no forgiveness for them upon earth? --"Wanda

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.

He mistook, as the cleverest men often do mistake, in underrating the cruelty of women.

There's a deal of goodness that the world never sees," said Tussler in conclusion, "as there's a deal of viciousness it never guesses.

He crept up, and touched the face of the boy. "Didst thou dream that I should be faithless and forsake thee? I— a dog?" said that mute caress.

I have know a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.

Experience is an excellent spyglass; but it has this drawback, that Prejudice very often clouds the lens.

Her life had been altogether artificial; she had always been a great garden lily in a hot-house, she had never known what it was to be blown by a fresh breeze on a sun-swept moorland like a heather flower. The hot-house shelters from all chills and is full of perfume, but you can see no horizon from it; that alone is the joy of the moorland.

The world never leaves one in ignorance or in peace.

Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.

No doubt the shortness of your memories is a very convenient thing for you; for without it I really don't know how you could have the conscience to repudiate your debts, swear in your witness boxes, take your marriage vows, traverse your divorce petitions, or do half the things that you do do. But, owing to the perfection of our remembrance, I can recall every trifle of the life that I then enjoyed with him.

There are wrongs for which religion makes no provision, and of which it has no comprehension. --"Wanda

Is there a more pitiable spectacle than that of a wife contending with others for that charm in her husband's sight which no philters and no prayers can renew when once it has fled forever? Women are so unwise. Love is like a bird's song beautiful and eloquent when heard in forest freedom, harsh and worthless in repetition when sung from behind prison bars. You cannot secure love by vigilance, by environment, by captivity. What use is it to keep the person of a man beside you if his soul be truant from you?

In the violent scorn of her revolted pride, of her indignant honor, had she forgotten a lowlier yet harder duty left undone? In her contempt and dread of yielding to mere amorous weakness had she stifled and denied the cry of pity, the cry of conscience? To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite. To forgive wrongs darker than death or night. To defy power which seems omnipotent. To love and live to hope till hope creates from it's own wreck the thing it contemplates. Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent. This had been the higher, diviner way which she had missed, this obligation from the passion of the past which she had left unfulfilled, unaccepted. Now the misgiving arose in her whether she had mistaken arrogance for duty; whether, cleaving so closely to honor she had forgotten the obligation of mercy.

She was like a queen who beholds the virgin soil of her kingdom invaded and wasted by a traitor. Any other thing she would have pardoned: infidelity, indifference, cruelty, any sins of manhood's caprice or passion, but who should pardon this? The sin was not alone against herself; it was against every law of decency and truth that ever she had been taught to hold sacred; it was against all those great dead, who lay with the cross on their breasts and their swords by their side, from whom she had received and treasured the traditions of honor and purity of race. It was those dead knights whom he had smote upon the mouth and mocked, crying to them: 'Lo! your place is mine; my sons will reign in your stead. I have tainted your race forever; for every my blood flows with yours!' The greatness of a race is a thing far higher than mere pride. Its instincts are noble and supreme. Its obligations are no less than its privileges; it is a great light which streams backward through the darkness of the ages, and if by that light you guide not your footsteps, then are you thrice accursed, holding as you do that lamp of honor in your hands. So she had always thought, and now he had dashed the lamp in the dust. --"Wanda

My little brain was teeming with a myriad of visions—dogs have very vivid fancies, as you may tell by the excitement of our dreams.

Pearl's temper absolutely unbearable, and caused her to break her ivory hair-brush upon her maid's shoulders.

Men object to the surveillance of a wife, and most justly; but they seem to forget that it is nothing compared to the unscrupulous espionage of a courtesan.

After a little time they all began to smoke, the Pearl included, though she threw away much more of her cigar than she consumed

And I knew that she said truly; for indeed to live only to know the pains, the needs, the agonies, and the travails that lie in living, is a hard fate, though it be the fate of millions.

So we, in thoughtless play, twist the first gleaming and silky threads of the fatal cord which will cling about our necks, fastened beyond hope of release, as long as our lives shall last!

An hour drifted by. The church clock on the cliffs had struck four times; a deep-toned, weary bell, that tolled for every quarter, and must often have been heard, at dead of night, by dying men, drowning unshriven and unhouseled.

Then it might interest you to know,” said Mrs. Encombe, “that when I was in Florence last Easter I was introduced to Ouida.” “That’s quite another matter,” returned Mrs. Hayforth. “I can’t believe that any lady would read a book by Ouida.

Than to suppose that they like what is human and real, he means," said Beltran. "They don't care the least about that; they like a little broad farce, a little rough murder, and a little rosewater sentiment: anything more bothers them. They can't understand it.

Even the sheep think, I do believe, though they look so stupid. Everything in creation thinks, that's my idea. Look at a little beetle, how clever it is, how cunning in defense, how patient in labor, how full of disquiet;—but you cannot understand, you are only a nursling.

What? A character almost as awful as Phaedre, and quite as desolate as Antigone, represented by a graceful coquette in point lace and pearls, who will take poison as sweetly as if it were a cup of coffee, and will die with elaborate care not to tumble her train? Preposterous!

Trust was right, as, looking back on that time, I know now, in thinking that Ben had some touch in him of the poet. Not of the poet's utterance, surely; I do not think he could have strung a line of words together to save his existence; but of the poet's temperament, of the poet's feeling.

Nello and Patrasche were left all alone in the world. They were friends in a friendship closer than brotherhood. Nello was a little Ardennois—Patrasche was a big Fleming. They were both of the same age by length of years, yet one was still young, and the other was already old. They had dwelt together almost all their days: both were orphaned and destitute, and owed their lives to the same hand. It had been the beginning of the tie between them, their first bond of sympathy; and it had strengthened day by day, and had grown with their growth, firm and indissoluble, until they loved one another very greatly.

This was thoroughly irrational in me, of course. The happiness of our very early years is quite unconscious, and derives its peace from that very unconsciousness. If a child, or a puppy, knew he were happy, he would be analytical; and with the first moment of self-analysis the first shadow of discomfort would fall.

close to the objects of her attachment, the little lovely yellow chickens, surely the prettiest of all new-born things; humiliatingly pretty beside the rough ugliness of new-born man, who piques himself on being lord of all created creatures; God knows why, except that he is slowest in development, and quickest in evil!

As a postscript, it is interesting to note that on a visit to London in 1886, Ouida did meet Oscar Wilde and indeed published four articles in his magazine Woman’s World between 1888 and 1889; her experience of knowing Wilde, who described her as “the last romantic”, did influence her later works, however superficially.

Whatever good I have kept in me—and in the world it is very hard to keep any—I owe it to Ben on those still Sunday mornings in those deep, old, quiet, green woods.

Beautiful she was by the morning light; with her fair, rich color, and her gleaming eyes, and her crown of halfbright, half-dusky hair, like the bronze in which there much mixture of gold. But I thought I never saw anything of so much greed, or so intensely selfish. There was a vivid animal pleasure in the sight of what were dainties to her senses ; but there was no sort of gratitude or feeling at the generous and thoughtful affection which had been thus tender of her in her absence. She ate all there was on the table; seeming to like to draw the pleasure out to its longest span; when ended, she washed the things and set them away, and did a little house-work, all in a very idle, slovenly manner—like one whose heart was not at all in her occupation.

The old man was silent: the truth suggested itself to him with the boy's innocent answer. He was tied to a bed of dried leaves in the corner of a wattle hut, but he had not wholly forgotten what the ways of the world were like.

Then he went straightway to the presence-chamber; and he spoke in the speech of men; and he told his lord of that frail wife's dishonor, and said, 'Arise I cast her off, and be strong as thou ever hast been.' But the king, mad with rage, would not hearken; he leaped down from his ivory throne, and drew bis dagger out from his girdle, and thrust it into the heart of Ilderiui. 'So serve I the foes of my angel!' he cried; and Ilderim fell at his feet. 'I forgive,' he said simply,—and died.

There was no sort of change from dawn to sunset. My heart was heavy for all those whom I had lost. It seemed to me that life was but a sequence of tender ties, formed only to be ruptured, and leave the torn heart aching. I missed, moreover, the glad, sweet, summer season in the open air; the freedom of the old fruit gardens and flower-covered ways; the homely, happy sounds of all the stirring bees and chirming birds, of the ducks in the dark cool pond, and the lowing cattle in the poplarbelted meadows.

We believe in the innocent demoiselles, who look so naïve, and such sweet English rosebuds at morning fêtes, and do not dream those glossy braids cover empty, but world-shrewd little heads, ever plotting how to eclipse dearest Cecilia, or win old Hautton’s coronet; we accept their mamma’s invitations, and think how kindly they are given, not knowing that we are only asked because we bring Shako of the Guards with us, who is our bosom chum, and has fifteen thousand a year, and that, Shako fairly hooked, we, being younger sons, shall be gently dropped.

I often wondered, by the way, why men, who had their own admirable cooks, and their own elegant abodes, and their own choice, selected wines, were so addicted to coming out to dinner at the Star and Garter, or Ship, or any suburban place, that it was fashionable to dine at in this manner. I often wondered what peculiar attraction existed for them in spending about five times as much on their dinner as it would have cost at home, only for the sake of getting in return a questionable cuisine, lumpy sauces, cold soups, and fifth-rate champagnes at exorbitant prjces.

I remembered Ben's words when I also entered that abomination of desolation—the eastern half of the city of labor. In the little cottage in the pine wood, even in the dreariness of winter and under the drag of poverty, there had been beauty—beauty in the white, smooth, glittering enow;

if the truth were always in our minds, or the future always plain before us, should we make the fifty false steps that the wisest man amongst us is certain to rue before half his sands are run? If they knew that before night was down the sea-foam would be whirling high, and the curlews screaming in human fear, and the gay little boat lying keel upwards on the salt ocean surf, would the pleasure-party set out so fearlessly in the morning sunshine, with champagne flowing and bright eyes glancing, and joyous laughter ringing over the golden sands and up to the fleecy heavens?

everybody has' disappeared' who isn't starring and staring before the world's footlights. We are uncommonly fond of our celebrities,—oh, yes,—we buy their photographs and steal their characters with the greatest ardor imaginable. We are always flinging flowers before them, and throwing stones after them, with the most affectionate energy possible. But it's only while they're in the range of our eyesight. If they retire, or pause, or only get sick for a little, we've done with them. Your statesman may have overworked his brain in your service; your painter may have paralysis; your author may have gone to his ' otium cum dignitate,' and your actress may have married or be a dying;—it's all the same; they have disappeared; and the world thinks no more about them.

In the austere pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes he carefully explained to his readers that d'Annunzio's lewdness must not be confused with the obscenities of Zola, whereat Ouida protested that they were alike in their complacent preoccupation with mere filth. The Frenchman is the sounder critic, it must be said, for while d'Annunzio frequently parallels some of the most unclean—in the literal, not the moral sense—scenes and incidents in Zola, his attitude about sex is as unlike Zola's as that of the late W. D. Howells. Only in "Nana" did Zola describe the life and emotions of a woman whose whole life is given up to love, and then, as we know, he chose a singularly crude and professional person, using her career as a symbol of the Second Empire. D'Annunzio has never described women with any other reason for existence but love, yet none of his heroines has poor Nana's uninspiring motives.

Four piles of dead were heaped together like broken meat on a butcher’s stall — not a whit more tenderly — and cleared out of the way like carrion; the ground was broken up into great pools of blood, black and noisome; troops of flies were swarming like mimic vultures on bodies still warm, on men still conscious, crowding over the festering wounds (for these men had lain there since Saturday at noon!), buzzing their death-rattle in ears already maddened with torture. That was what we saw in the Malakoff, what we saw a little later in the Great Redan, where among cookhouses, brimful of human blood, English and Russian lay clasped together in a fell embrace, petrified by death; where the British lay in heaps, mangled beyond recognition by their dearest friends, or scorched and blackened by the recent explosions; and where — how strange they looked there! — there stood outside the entrance of one of the houses, a vase of flowers, and a little canary!

Men are always optimists when they look inwards, and pessimists when they look around them.

WHAT a pace one lives at through the season! And, when one is fresh to it, before one knows that its pleasant, frothy, syllabub surface is only a cover to intrigues, petty spites, jealousies, partisanships, manoeuvres; alike in St Stephen’s as in Belgravia; among uncompromising patriots as among poor foreigners farming private banks round about St James’s-street; among portly aristocratic mothers, trotting out their innocent daughters to the market, as among the gauze-winged, tinselled, hard-worked deities of the coulisses; — how agreeable it is!

I never judge people; seemingly bad actions may have good motives, good ones may spring from base and selfish ends.

A young man married is a man that’s marred.’ That’s a golden rule, Arthur; take it to heart. Anne Hathaway, I have not a doubt, suggested it; experience is the sole abestos, only unluckily one seldom gets it before one’s hands are burnt irrevocably. Shakespeare took to wife the ignorant, rosy-cheeked, Warwickshire peasant girl, at eighteen! Poor fellow! I picture him, with all his untried powers, struggling like new-born Hercules for strength and utterance, and the great germ of poetry within him, tinging all the common realities of life with its rose hue; genius giving him power to see with God-like vision, the ‘fairies nestling in the cowslip chalices,’ and the golden gleam of Cleopatra’s sails; to feel the ‘spiced Indian air’ by night, and the wild working of kings’ ambitious lust; to know by intuition, alike the voices of nature unheard by common ears, and the fierce schemes and passions of a world from which social position shut him out!

Sad? Oh, I don’t see that; nothing in life is worth calling sad. According to Heraclitus, everything is sad; according to Democritus, nothing is sad. The true secret is to take things as they come, and not trouble yourself sufficiently about anything to give it power to trouble you.

Don’t you remember my degree was given me this year because I am a Peer’s son?” asked Curly, reprovingly. “See what it is to be a Goth, without a classical education! You should have gone to Granta, De Vigne, you’d have been Stroke of the Cambridge Eight, not a doubt of it There’s muscle gone to waste! It’s very jolly, you see, being an Honourable, though I never knew it; one gets credit for brains whether one has them or not What an inestimable blessing to some of the pillars of the aristocracy, isn’t it? I suppose the House of Lords was instituted on that principle; and its members are no more required to know why they pass their bills, than we, their sons and heirs, are required to know why we pass our examinations, eh?

Poor child! you are much fit for a nurse! What do you know of wounds, of sickness, of death? What qualification have you to induce them to give you such an office? Do you think they would take such a fair face as yours among the sick wards? No, no, that is impracticable. You must wait: the lesson hardest of all to learn — one, I dare say, you have never had to learn at al!

the amateurs, who had come out to see what was doing in the Crimea, as they went other years to Norwegian fishing or Baden roulette, were scattered about in yachting costume, and stirred to a little excitement as the Russian shells began to burst among us, and the bombs to fall with thuds loud enough to startle the strongest nerves.

Sell yourself?” repeated the peeress. Fine ladies are not often fond of hearing things called by their proper names, “Yes, sell myself,” repeated Violet, bitterly, leaning against the mantelpiece, with a painful smile upon her lips. “Would you not put me up to auction, knock me down to the highest bidder? Marriage is the mart, mothers the auctioneers, and he who bids the highest wins. Women are like racers, brought up only to run for Cups, and win handicaps for their owners.” “Nonsense!” said her mother, impatiently. “You have lost your senses, I think. There is no question of ‘selling,’ as you term it. Marriage is a social compact, of course, where alliances suitable in position, birth, and wealth, are studied. Why should you pretend to be wiser than all the rest of the world? Most amiable and excellent women have married without thinking love a necessary ingredient Why should you object to a good alliance if it be a mariage de convenance?

which might have touched into sympathy, even the coldest nature. But (I do not think one can blame my Lady Molyneux; if she was born without feelings, perhaps she was hardly more responsible for the non-possession of them, than the idiot for the total absence of brain) her mother was not even silenced.

pale, but resolute as Eponina’s or Gertrude von der Wart’s — and I think the martyrdom of endurance is worse than the martyrdom of action!

Who upholds that the good is oft interred with our bones. ’Tisn’t true though it is Shakspeare who says it; if you leave your family or your pet hospital a good many thousands, you will get the cardinal virtues, and a trifle more, in letters of gold on your tomb; though if you have lived up to your income, or forgotten to insure, any penny-alining La Monnoye will do to scribble your epitaph, and break off with “C’est trop mentir pour cinq écus!

swept gently in till the air was full of the dreamy and voluptuous fragrance which lulls the senses and woos the heart to those softer moments which, could they but last, would make men never need to dream of heaven. Such hours are rare; what wonder if, to win them, we risk all, if in them we cry with the Lotus Eaters, “Let us alone. What is it that will last? All things sûre taken from us and become Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past. Let us alone. What pleasure can we have To war with evil? Is there any peace In ever climbing up the climbing wave? All things have rest and ripen toward the grave In silence; ripen, fall, and cease. Give us long rest or death; dark death or dreamful ease.

when gallops on hired shying hacks were doubly dear, by prohibition; and filthy bird’s-eye, smoked in clays, sweeter to our senses then, than purest Havannahs smoked to-day, on the steps of Pratt’s,

That fellow De Vigne’s dreaming away in comfort, while we’re dragged out by the heels, for a lot of confounded humbug and form,” lamented Curly to me as we entered; while the readers hurried the prayers over, in that singsong recitative in favour with collegemen — a cross between the drone of a gnat, and the whine of a Suffolk peasant. We dozed comfortably, sitting down, and getting up, at the right times, by sheer force of habit; or read Dumas, or Balzac, under cover of our prayer-books.

There was every type of the genus sporting man; stout, square farmers, with honest bull-dog physique, characteristic of John Bull plebeian; wild young Cantabs, mounted showily from livery-stables, with the fair, fearless, delicate features characteristic of John Bull patrician; steady old whippers-in, very suspicious of brandy; wrinkled feeders, with stentorian voices that the wildest puppy had learned to know and dread; the courteous, cordial aristocratic M.F.H., with the men of his class, the county gentry; rough, ill-looking cads, awkward at all things save crossing country; no end of pedestrians, nearly run over themselves, and falling into everybody’s way; and last, but in our eyes not least, the ladies who had come to see the hounds throw off.

How pleasant they were, those jolly college days! As I think of them, many kindly faces and joyous voices rise before me! Where are they all? Some lying with the colours on their breast beside the Euxine Sea, and along the line of the Pacific; some struck down by the assassin’s knife in the temples at Cawnpore; some sleeping beneath the sighing of the Delhi palms, or of the sad Atlantic waves; some wasting classic eloquence on country hinds, in moss-grown village churches; some fighting the great fight, between science and death, in the crowded hospital-wards of London; some wearing honour, and honesty, and truth from their hearts, in the breathless, up-hill press of the great world; — all of them, living or dead, scattered far away over the earth, since those old days, in the shadow of the academic walls!

Now came the question, what should I do? “Nothing,” the correct thing, according to the governor. “Stand for the county,” my mother suggested. “Go as attaché to my cousin, the envoy to St. Petersburg,” my relatives opined, who had triumphed, with much unholy glory, over my rustication, as is the custom of relatives from time immemorial.

The two men who were fencing were De Vigne and a smaller, slighter fellow; the one calm, cool, steady, and never at a disadvantage, the other, skilful indeed, but too hot, eager, and rapid: for in fencing, whether with the foils or the tongue, the grand secret is to be cool, since, in proportion to your tranquillity, grows your opponent’s exasperation!

Why? For this reason — that nobody does. Hollingsworth and he were cornets together; yet Hollingsworth is as much a stranger to the real man as you or I. There are some fellows, you know, who don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves; he is one, I am another. Men are like snowballs: to begin with, it’s a piece of snow, soft and pure and malleable, and easily enough melted; but the snowball soon gets kicked about and mixed up with other snow, and knocked against stones and angles, and hurried, and shoved, and pushed along till, in sheer selfdefence, it hardens itself into a solid, impenetrable, immovable block of ice!

the love of Francesca and Paolo, often essayed by artists, yet never rendered, even by Ary Scheffer, as Dante would have had it, and as it was rendered here. There were no vulgarities of a fabled Hell; there were the two, alone in that true torture — Ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria —  yet happy, because together. Her face and form were in full light, his in shadow. Heart beating against heart, their arms round each other, they looked down into each other’s eyes. On his face were the fierce passions, against which he had had no strength, mingled with deep and yearning regret for the fate he had drawn in with his own. On hers, lifted up to him, was all the love at sight of which he who beheld it “swooned even as unto death;” the love — — placer si forte, Che come vedi ancor non m’abbandona — the love which made hell, paradise; and torture together, dearer than heaven alone.

Attendre et espérer’?” repeated Alma. “To me they are the saddest words in human language. They are so seldom the joy-bells to herald a new future — they are’ so often the death-knell to a past wasted in futile striving and disappointed desire. ‘Attendre et espérer!’ How many golden days pass in trusting to those words; and when their trust be at last recompensed, how often the fulfilment comes too late to be enjoyed. ‘Attendre et espérer!’ Ah! that is all very well for those who have some fixed goal in view — some aim which they will attain if they have but energy and patience enough to go steadily on to the end; but only to wait for an indefinite better fate, which year after year retreats still farther — only to hope against hope for what never comes and in all probability will never come — that is not quite so easy.

IT is strange how the outer world surrounds yet never touches the inner; how the gay and lighter threads of life intervene yet never mingle with those that are darkest and sternest, as the parasite clings to the forest tree, united yet ever dissimilar!

A little farther on, in the old playing-field, there were the wickets, and the bats, and the jumping poles, and four or five boys, in their shirt sleeves and their straw hats, enjoying their half-holiday, as we had done before them. So life goes on; when one is bowled out, another is ready to step into his shoes, and, no matter how many the ball of death may knock over, the cricket of life is kept up the same, and players are never wanting!

Ouida’s first novel was published in three volumes in 1863, though it had previously been released in serial form as Granville de Vigne in The New Monthly magazine from January 1861 to June 1863, as was the common practice at the time. The author was only twenty-four years old at the time, but was later to claim that this was not her first attempt at writing and that her 1867 novel Idalia was written when she was just sixteen.

Ouida is not afraid to play with gender roles and her explorations of femininity in men and masculinity in women, were considered avant-garde

It did not induce brain fever, or harm her so, belles lectrices. If we went down under every stroke in that way as novelists assume, we should all be loved of Heaven if that love be shown by early graves, as the old Greeks say.

I, the most knowing hand in Granta — I, who if I did pique myself on any one thing, piqued myself on my skill and knowledge in managing the beau sexe — I, to be told I did not know women! I pocketed the affront, however, as best I might, for I felt a growing respect for the Colonel, with his myriad talents, his brilliant reputation, and mysterious reserve; and told him I did not believe De Vigne cared an atom more for the Trefusis than for twenty others before her. “I hope so,” he answered; “but that chess they are playing yonder ends too often in checkmate. However, we will not prophesy so bad a fate for our friend; for worse he could not have than to fall into those soft hands. By the way, though, her hands are not soft, they are not the hands of a lady.

I have danced the fandango; no more able to help myself when the girl and the castanets began, than the holy cardinals, who, when they came to Madrid to excommunicate the cachuca, ended by joining in it! Like the rest of us, I suppose, they found forbidding a thing to other people, very easy and pleasant, but going without it themselves rather more difficult.

Out campaigning, one is free from all that trash. Before the cannon’s mouth men cannot stop to split straws; and with one’s own life on a thread, one cannot stop to ruin another’s character. I do not know how it is — I have read pretty widely, but philosophers never preached endurance to me as well as Nature.

Nature would be a truer teacher than creeds or homilies. Human life seems so small beside the vast life of great forests. The calm grand silence rebukes our own feverishness. We who fancy that the eyes of all the universe are on us, that we are the sole love and charge of its Creator, feel what ephemera we are in the giant scale of existence; what countless myriads of such as we have been swept from their place out of sight, and not a law of the spheres around been stirred, not a moment’s pause been caused, in the silent march of creation!

I believe you,” he said, gently; “there arc sensitive plants, so fresh and fair, that it is a sin they should ever have to shiver in rude hands, and learn to bend with the world’s breath. But live as long as we have, and you will know that the deep feeling of which you are thinking is never found in unison with the poetic and drivelling sentiment we ridicule. Boys’ sorrows vent themselves in words — men’s griefs are voiceless. If ever you feel — pray God you never may — vital suffering, you will find that it will never seek solace in confidences, never lament itself, but rather hug its torture closer, as the Spartan child hugged the fierce wolf-fangs. You will find the difference between the fictitious sorrows which run abroad proclaiming their own wrongs; and the grief which lies next the heart night and day, and, like the iron cross of the Romish priest, eats it slowly, but none the less surely, away.

we medical men, my dear lady, have no time to stop for conventionalities when life is in the balance. If Major de Vigne were anywhere in this country I would make him come and quiet my patient by a sight of him; all she does is to sob quietly, and murmur that man’s name to herself, and if we cannot get at the mind we cannot work miracles with the body. Any shock would be better than this dreamy lethargy; there is no knowing to what mischief it may not lead. I shall tell her he is gone to the Crimea!

Montressor saw that without the freedom of air, to which she was accustomed, she would never be better. Miss Russel’s rector, like many another rector, since he “knew nothing of the young person,” would not have thought of wasting one of his spare beds on a stranger “of no connexions,” and “you know, my dear, for anything we can tell, perhaps of no very pure moral character,” as he remarked to his wife, previous to rustling into church in his stiff and majestic surplice, and giving for his text the story of Mary Magdalene.

He laughed again. “Well, I’ve seen life — I told you young fellows at Frestonhills, I trusted to my sauce piquante; and I must say it has used me very well hitherto, and I dare say always will as long as I keep away from the Jews. While a man has plenty of tin, all the world offers him the choicest dinner; though, when he has overdrawn at Coutts’s, his friends wouldn’t give him dry bread to keep him out of the union! Be able to dine en prince at home, and you’ll be invited out every night of your life; be hungry au troisième, and you must not lick the crumbs from under your sworn allies’ tables, those jolly good fellows, who have surfeited themselves at yours many a time! Oh yes, I enjoy life; a man always can as long as he can pay for it!

Where grave philosophers have watched the setting sun die out of the sky, as the glories of their own youth have died away unvalued, till lost for ever. Where ascetic reading-men have mooned along its banks blind to all the loveliness of the water-lily below, or the clouds above, as they took their constitutional and pondered their prize essay.

Miss Molyneux, what a treat!” smiled Sabretasche, who could say impudent things so gracefully, that every one liked them from his lips. “You have the candour to say what every other young lady thinks. We know you all like us very much, but none of you will ever admit it! You say you enjoyed the review? I thought no belle, after her first season, ever condescended to ‘enjoy’ anything.” “Don’t they!” laughed Violet; “how I pity them! I am an exception, then, for I enjoy an immense number of things; everything, indeed, except my presentation, where I was ironed quite flat, and very nearly crushed to death, and, finally, came before her Majesty in a state of collapse, like a maimed india-rubber ball. Not enjoy things! Why, I enjoy my morning gallop on Bonbon; I enjoy my flowers, and birds, and dogs. I delight in the opera, I adore waltzing, I perfectly idolise music, and the day when a really good book comes out, or a really good painting is exhibited, I am in a seventh heaven. Not enjoy things! Oh, Colonel Sabretasche, when I cease to enjoy life, I hope I shall cease to live!

You are young enough! — and yet, I don’t know; it is a popular fallacy that time counts by years. One is old according to the style of one’s life, not the length of it.

No, I can fancy your temptations, I can picture your errors and your follies, I can understand how you drink your poison one hour because you liked its flavour, and drink more the next hour to make you forget your weakness in having yielded to it at all. That my own solitude and imagination are only peopled with shapes bright and fair, I must thank Heaven and not myself. If I had been born in squalor and nursed in vice, what would circumstance and surroundings have made me! Oh, I think, instead of the Pharisee’s presumptuous ‘I thank God that I am holier than he,’ our thanksgiving should be, ‘I thank God that I have so little opportunity to do evil!’ and we should forgive, as we wish to be forgiven ourselves, those whose temptations, either from their own nature or from the outer world, have been so much greater than our own.

Too well to compliment you on it. I ‘liked’ it as I liked, or rather I felt it — as I have felt, occasionally, the tender and holy beauty of Raphael, the hushed glories of a summer night, the mystical chimes of a starlit sea. Your voice did me good, as those things did, until the feverish fret and noise of practical life wore off their influence again.” Violet gave a deep sigh of delight “You make me so happy! I often think that the doc-’ trine of immortality has no better plea than the vague yearning for something unseen and unconceived, the unuttered desire which rises in us, at the sound of true music. I have heard music at which I could have shed more bitter tears than any I have known, for I have had no sorrow, and which answered the restless passions of my heart better than any human mind that ever wrote.

Bravo!” said Curly, as five minutes afterwards we passed out from the great hall door. “You are a brick, De Vigne, and no mistake. How splendidly you pitched into that rascally keeper!” De Vigne laughed. “It was a good bit of fun. Always stand up for your rights, my boy; if you don’t, who will? I never was done yet in my life, and never intend to be.

When he had once determined on a thing he never looked back; sometimes it had been better for him if he had. Yet, in the long run, I have known more mischief done by indecision of character than anything else in the world, and he is safe to be the strongest and stoutest-hearted who never looks back, whether he has determined on quitting Sodom or on staying in it The evil lies in hasty judgment, not in prompt action.

ALADYN and Devno! — those green stretching meadows, those rich dense forests, catching the golden glow of the sunshine of the East — those sloping hill-sides, with the clematis, and acacia, and wild vine clinging to them, and the laughing waters of lake and stream sleeping at their base — who could believe that horrible pestilential vapour stole up from them, like a murderer in the dark, and breathing fever, ague, and dysentery into the tents of a slumbering Army, stabbed the sleepers while they lay, unconscious of the assassin’s hand that was draining away their life and strength!

Days, when you could not stroll on the beach, without finding at your feet a corpse, hastily thrust into the loosened sand, for dogs to gnaw and vultures to make their meal, or look across the harbour without seeing some dead body floating, upright and horrible, in the face of the summer sun.

But when I think of them all, my dead friends, whose bodies lie thick where the sweet wild lavender is blowing over the barren steppes of the Chersonese this summer’s day, I remember, wrathfully, how civilians, by their own warm hearths, sat and dictated measures by which whole regiments, starving with cold, sickened and died; and how Indian officers, used to the luxurious style of Eastern warfare and travel, asserted those privations to be “nothing,” which they were not called to bear; and I fear — I fear — that England may one day live to want such sons of hers as she let suffer and rot on the barren plains of the Crimea, in such misery as she would shudder to entail on a pauper or a convict Few of us will ever forget our first bivouac on the Chersonese soil — that pitiless drenching down-pour of sheets of ink-black water!

Our turn was near at hand. An hour after we received the order to advance on the Russian guns. With the blame, on whomsoever it may lie of that rash order, I have nothing to do. That vexatious question can never be settled, since he on whose shoulders they place it lies in the valley of Balaklava, the first who fell, and cannot raise his voice to reply, or give the lie, if it be a lie, to his calumniators. If Louis Nolan were to blame, his love for our Arm, and his jealousy over its honour, his belief that Light Cavalry would do the work of demigods, and his irritation that hitherto we had not been given the opportunity we might have had, must plead his excuse; and I think his brilliant courage, and the memory of that joyous cheer which ended in the wild death-cry which none who heard can ever forget, might silence the angry jar and jangle of contention above his grave, and set the seals of oblivion upon his error!

If they did not credit it, we did. We knew it was against all maxims of war for Cavalry to act without support, or infantry at hand. We knew that in all probability few indeed, if any of us, would ever come back from that rapid and deadly ride. But the order was given. There were the guns — and away we went, quickening from trot to canter, and from canter to gallop, as we drew nearer to them. On we went, spurring our horses across the space that divided us from those grim fiery mouths.

It was with bitter hearts and deadly thoughts that we, the remnant of the Six Hundred, rode back, leaving the flower of the Light Brigade dead or dying before those murderous Russian guns; — and it was all done, all over, in five-and-twenty minutes — less than a fast up-wind fox-hunt would have taken at home!

For I had no sort of doubt or hope left in me; I knew that she was going to sell " tha pup," as well as though I had heard her proclaim aloud her wicked intent.

Jack loudly protested against such literal interpretation of his figurative language, and a very pretty bout with fisticuffs was the result,—the innocent kettle ultimately being battered to pieces in the fray. Such is men's justice; in all their quarrels there is always some poor luckless kettle which, sinless itself, gets the blows from each side

she was very liberal in her range of literature. All languages being equally intelligible to us (though we can never comprehend why you have not all one and the same, as we superior animals have), I derived considerable entertainment from hearing the innumerable works, in various tongues, which her companion read aloud to her almost from morning to night.