IN April 1882 my father died; and I was at once whirled out of my land of dreams into a very different sphere.
Let your mind be quiet, realizing the beauty of the world, and the immense boundless treasures that it holds.
Remember, the serpent is still living in the Garden of Eden. Only the heterosexual couple was expelled.
Making a choice is like backing a horse – in a hundred years, they may decide you picked wrongly.
I saw deep in the eyes of the animals, the human soul look out upon me.
When he was twenty-three or twenty-four my father began to learn German and read philosophy in his spare hours, which did not look as though he were destined to remain long on board ship!
The other thing that happened in 1883 was my reading of Thoreau’s Walden.
The general fact of surplus value, namely that the workmen does not get the full value of his labours, and that he is taken advantage of by the capitalist, is obvious.
IT is curious that, with my somewhat antinomian tendencies, I should have gone to Trinity Hall – which was, and is, before all a Law College – and should thus have been thrown into close touch with the legal element in life.
I might have simply settled down into an armchair literary life. I really don’t know exactly why I didn’t.
My ideas had been taking a socialistic shape for many years; but they were lacking in definite outline.
Motherhood is, after all, woman’s great and incomparable work.
I was in the Square at the time. The crowd was a most good-humoured, easy going, smiling crowd; but presently it was transformed. A regiment of mounted police came cantering up.
Where there had been only jeers or taunts at first, crowds come to listen with serious and sympathetic men.
Great success in examinations does naturally not as a rule go with originality of thought.
What is the good of life if its chief element, and that which must always be its chief element, is odious? No, the only true economy is to arrange so that your daily labor shall be itself a joy.
With my somewhat vague aspiring mind, to be imprisoned in the rude details of a most material life was often irksome.
Anyone who realises what Love is, the dedication of the heart, so profound, so absorbing, so mysterious, so imperative, and always just in the noblest natures so strong, cannot fail to see how difficult, how tragic even, must often be the fate of those whose deepest feelings are destined from the earliest days to be a riddle and a stumbling-block, unexplained to themselves, passed over in silence by others.
It would seem probable that the attachment of such a one is of a tender and profound character; indeed, it is possible that in this class of men we have the love sentiment in one of its most perfect forms – a form in which from the necessities of the situation the sensuous element, though present, is exquisitely subordinated to the spiritual.
For any sustained and more or less original work it seems most necessary that one should have the quietude and strength of Nature at hand, like a great reservoir from which to draw. The open air, and the physical and mental health that goes with it, the sense of space and freedom of the Sky, the vitality and amplitude of the Earth – these are real things from which one can only cut oneself off at serious peril and risk to one’s immortal soul.