Idolatry
lined; nor apt to counterfeit so much as a smile, only because a smile would look well. What showed a rarer audacit
vate an enemy, as more likely to be instructive than some friends. His love of actual battle was intense: he had punched heads with many a hard-fisted school-boy in England; he bore the scar of a German schl?ger high up on his forehead; and later, in Paris, he had deliberately invaded the s
r needs of the good and truth of life, as existing in material manifestation: the cook is the high-priest of that symbolic ceremony! I, and kings with me, bow before him! But his is a responsibility beneath which Atlas might stagg
en go on to say, "arise from the cultivation of the stomach. From man's very earthliness springs the flower of his spiritual virtue. We affect to despise the flesh, as vile and unworthy. What, then, is flesh made of? of nothing?-l
ated throwing it over, abandoning the Yankee nation to its fate, and seeking some more congenial field. Balder, who, when the mood was on him, could wield a tongue persuasive as Richard the Third's, talked to this man, and in seven minutes had won his whole heart. The immediate result was a delectable breakfast, but the sequel was a triumph indeed. It seems that the ?sthetic Italian had for several days been watching over a brace of plump, truffled partridges. This day they had reached perfection, and were to have been eaten by no les
ade a handsome picture,-tall, gallant, unique. The May sunshine, falling, athwart the face of the gloomy old building, was glad to light up the waves of his beard and hair, and to cast the shadow of his hat-brim over his forehead and ey
o be had-he was by no means indifferent. Towards mankind at large he showed a kindly but irreverent charity, which excused imperfection, not so much from a divine principle of love as from scepticism as to man's sufficient
arn its limits from no purely subjective source. The lesson must begin from without, and the only argument will be a deadly struggle. Until then, self-esteem, however veiled beneath self-criticism, cannot but
pend part of the interval before dinner in exploring Boston. He walked with an easy sideways-swaying of the sho
oney! Wonder whether the Directors ever thought of that? For all his unreality,
Was that the extreme of senility? or was it a subtile assertion of the fact, that he who keeps in the vanguard of the age in a
ighteen years merely for love? Why did he transfer that money so soon after we sailed? Ten to one, he has in his own hands the future as well as the pres
may be dead, or pastor of a small parish, for all you know. And yet every school-girl can prattle of the educational uses of poverty, and of having to make one's own living! I have a good mind to take your thousand pounds sterling out of your po
re to find out truths about things and men. This is not the story of a fortune-hunter; not, at all events, of a hunter of such fortunes as are made and lost nowadays. But, when one half of a man detects unworthy motives in the other half, it is em
, and tossed his beard, and shouldered inoffensive people aside, and drew his eyebrows togethe
man was walking along some distance ahead, carrying something in one hand. Helwyse at first mended his pace to overtake the fellow,
gue; and so imperfectly could his fleshly veil conceal his mental processes, that he gesticulated everything that passed through his mind. These gestures, though perfectly apparentook in an imaginary face. At times he would stretch out a pleading arm and neck; the next moment he was an inflexible tyrant, spurning a suppliant. Again he would break into a soundless chuckle; then, raising his hand to his
seeming to perceive the rather grisly simili
ks to himself, mankind would fly asunder, and think the stars hiding-places not remote enough! How many men in the world could walk from one end of the street they live in to the other, talking and acting their inmost thoughts all the way,
wn vileness and live. They think their hideousness charming, and, when the darkness is thickest about them, most firmly bel
l not be our cue to quote him, save when to
t doesn't concern me? That violin-box he carries is very much in his way; shall I offer to carry it for hi
folding-doors to some place unseen. The house had an air of villanous respectability,-a gambling-house air, or worse. Did the musicia
makes the pulse of time beat; creates society, industry, and rank. Hunger moves man to join in the work of creation,-to harmonize himself with the music of the universe,-to feel ambition, joy, and sorrow. Hunger unites man to nature in the ever-recurring inspiration to food, followed by the ever-alternating ecstas
hat afternoon, in the back pantry, and they solemnl