Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity. The.
All through life that piece of crape had hung between him and the world; it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman’s love and kept him in that saddest of all prisons his own heart;.
I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a black veil!
In short, there has seldom been seen so depressed and sad a figure as this young girl’s; and it was hardly possible to help being angry with her, from mere despair of doing anything for her comfort.
She perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon.
Yet those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner’s purpose to read the human soul.
The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognised a kindred wilderness in the human child.
All human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.
Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay, than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment.
Woman, I could wellnigh pity thee!” said Roger Chillingworth, unable to restrain a thrill of admiration too; for there was a quality almost majestic in the despair which she expressed. “Thou hadst great elements. Peradventure, hadst thou met earlier with a better love than mine, this evil had not been. I pity thee, for the good that has been wasted in thy nature!
The days of the far off future would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take up and bear along with her but never to fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame.
It was not painful to behold this look; for, though dim, it had not the imbecility of decaying age.
And as for Owen Warland, he looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life’s labor, and which was yet no ruin. He had caught a far other butterfly than this. When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality.
Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man’s book too, and that with mine own blood!
The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.
Instead of a reprimand for their previous negligence, the case seemed rather to require an eulogium on their praiseworthy caution after the mischief had happened; a grateful recognition of the promptitude of their zeal the moment that there was no longer any remedy.
The law we broke! – the sin here so awfully revealed! – let these alone be in thy thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be, that, when we forgot our God, – when we violated our reverence each for the other’s soul, – it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion.
That little baggage hath witchcraft in her.
It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another’s actual and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet in the dim wood that it was like the first encounter in the world beyond the grave of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost.
Ever afterwards so touched, and so transfigured.