Shirley quotes

Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard.

Something real, cool, and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.

It is not positively affirmed that you shall not have a taste of the exciting, perhaps towards the middle and close of the meal, but it is resolved that the first dish set upon the table shall be one that a Catholic—ay, even an Anglo-Catholic—might …

“

Davy, thou hast an enormous organ of wonder in thy cranium.

Malone, you see, has none. Neither murders nor visions interest him. See what a big vacant Saph he looks at this moment.”

His aim had been to effect a radical reform, which he had executed as fast as his very limited capital would allow; and the narrowness of that capital, and consequent check on his progress, was a restraint which galled his spirit sorely.

Moore ever wanted to push on. “Forward” was the device stamped upon his soul; but poverty curbed him.

Sometimes (figuratively) he foamed at the mouth when the reins were drawn very tight.

the war could not be terminated; efficient relief could not be raised. There was no help then; so the unemployed underwent their destiny—ate the bread and drank the waters of affliction.

Misery generates hate.

These sufferers hated the machines which they believed took their bread from them; they hated the buildings which contained those machines; they hated the manufacturers who owned those buildings.

For the rest, he was a conscientious, hardheaded, hard-handed, brave, stern, implacable, faithful little man; a man almost without sympathy, ungentle, prejudiced, and rigid, but a man true to principle, honourable, sagacious, and sincere.

It seems to me, reader, that you cannot always cut out men to fit their profession, and that you ought not to curse them because their profession sometimes hangs on them ungracefully.

Nor will I curse Helstone, clerical Cossack as he was.

He was not diabolical at all. The evil simply was—he had missed his vocation.

He should have been a soldier, and circumstances had made him a priest.

For the rest, he was a conscientious, hardheaded, hard-handed, brave, stern, implacable, faithful little man; a man almost without sympathy, ungentle, prejudiced, and rigid, but a man true to principle, honourable, sagacious, and sincere.

“

God often defends the powerful.

”

… about equality, but at heart he was a proud man—very friendly to his workpeople, very good to all who were beneath him, and submitted quietly to be beneath him, but haughty as Beelzebub to whomsoever the world deemed (for he deemed no man) his superior.

Revolt was in his blood: he could not bear control; his father, his grandfather before him, could not bear it, and his children after him never could.

The want of general benevolence made him very impatient of imbecility, and of all faults which grated on his strong, shrewd nature; it left no check to his cutting sarcasm.

his conversation, when he was disposed to please, was singularly interesting and original; and if he usually expressed himself in the Yorkshire dialect, it was because he chose to do so, preferring his native Doric to a more refined vocabulary,

“A Yorkshire burr,” he affirmed, “was as much better than a cockney’s lisp as a bull’s bellow than a raton’s squeak.”

Mr. Yorke knew everyone, and was known by everyone, for miles round; yet his intimate acquaintances were very few. Himself thoroughly original, he had no taste for what was ordinary: a racy, rough character, high or low, ever found acceptance with him;

“

Hortense, in Antwerp we were known rich; in England we were never known but poor.

”

“Of whom else do I think? Of whom else dare I think?

The poor ought to have no large sympathies; it is their duty to be narrow.

”

“Yes, Caroline.

Poverty is necessarily selfish, contracted, grovelling, anxious.

Now and then a poor man’s heart, when certain beams and dews visit it, may smell like the budding vegetation in yonder garden on this spring day, may feel ripe to evolve in foliage, perhaps blossom; but he must not encourage the pleasant impulse;

“He will not, I tell you. I can calculate his movements. I understand my brother.”

Suspense is irksome, disappointment bitter. All the world has, some time or other, felt that.

Caroline, obedient to orders, passed into the kitchen. Sarah was making a dress for herself at the table.

“

Ah! You judge me with your heart, Lina: you should judge me with your head.

”

and having arranged the ribbon of the instrument round her neck with a quiet fraternal kindness he knew to be all-powerful in soothing her most ruffled moods, he asked her to give him some of their mother’s favourite songs.

Nothing refines like affection. Family jarring vulgarizes; family union elevates.

Hortense, pleased with her brother, and grateful to him, looked, as she touched her guitar, almost graceful, almost handsome; her everyday fretful look was gone for a moment, and was replaced by a “sourire plein de bonté.”

and I will choose a part of it that is toned quite in harmony with something in you. It shall waken your nature, fill your mind with music; it shall pass like a skilful hand over your heart, and make its strings sound.

Your heart is a lyre, Robert; but the lot of your life has not been a minstrel to sweep it, and it is often silent.

Let glorious William come near and touch it. You will see how he will draw the English power and melody out of its chords.”

Caroline Helstone was just eighteen years old, and at eighteen the true narrative of life is yet to be commenced.

Before that time we sit listening to a tale, a marvellous fiction, delightful sometimes, and sad sometimes, almost always unreal. Before that time our world is heroic, its inhabitants half-divine or semi-demon; its scenes are dream-scenes;

whereas many a wilderness, and often the flood of death, or some stream of sorrow as cold and almost as black as death, is to be crossed ere true bliss can be tasted.

Every joy that life gives must be earned ere it is secured; and how hardly earned, those only know who have wrestled for great prizes.

The heart’s blood must gem with red beads the brow of the combatant, before the wreath of victory rustles over it.

Every joy that life gives must be earned ere it is secured; and how hardly earned, those only know who have wrestled for great prizes.

The heart’s blood must gem with red beads the brow of the combatant, before the wreath of victory rustles over it.

At eighteen we are not aware of this. Hope, when she smiles on us, and promises happiness tomorrow, is implicitly believed; Love, when he comes wandering like a lost angel to our door, is at once admitted, welcomed, embraced. His quiver is not seen;

At eighteen we are not aware of this.

Hope, when she smiles on us, and promises happiness tomorrow, is implicitly believed; Love, when he comes wandering like a lost angel to our door, is at once admitted, welcomed, embraced.

His quiver is not seen; if his arrows penetrate, their wound is like a thrill of new life. There are no fears of poison, none of the barb which no leech’s hand can extract. That perilous passion—an agony ever in some of its phases;

with many, an agony throughout—is believed to be an unqualified good. In short, at eighteen the school of experience is to be entered, and her humbling, crushing, grinding, but yet purifying and invigorating lessons are yet to be learned.

Alas, Experience! No other mentor has so wasted and frozen a face as yours, none wears a robe so black, none bears a rod so heavy, none with hand so inexorable draws the novice so sternly to his task, and forces him with authority so resistless to its acquirement.

It is by your instructions alone that man or woman can ever find a safe track through life’s wilds; without it, how they stumble, how they stray! On what forbidden grounds do they intrude, down what dread declivities are they hurled!

“

Every man is mad once or twice in his life.

”

You expected bread, and you have got a stone: break your teeth on it, and don’t shriek because the nerves are martyrized; do not doubt that your mental stomach—if you have such a thing—is strong as an ostrich’s; the stone will digest.

You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion.

Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind;

though, as Mary was the most sensible, the least coquettish, of the three, to her the elderly widower was the least attentive.

At heart he could not abide sense in women.

He liked to see them as silly, as lightheaded, as vain, as open to ridicule as possible, because they were then in reality what he held them to be, and wished them to be—inferior, toys to play with, to amuse a vacant hour, and to …

she would not permit herself to be treated quite as a doll, a child, a plaything; she expected to be bent to like a queen.

Hannah, on the contrary, demanded no respect, only flattery. If her admirers only told her that she was an angel, she would let them treat her like an idiot.

So very credulous and frivolous was she, so very silly did she become when besieged with attention, flattered and admired to the proper degree, that there were moments when Helstone actually felt tempted to commit matrimony a second time, and to try the experiment of …

Well, Caroline had, doubtless, her defective side too. She was human. She must, then, have been very imperfect; and had she seen Moore on his very worst side, she would probably have said this to herself and excused him.

Love can excuse anything except meanness; but meanness kills love, cripples even natural affection; without esteem true love cannot exist.

Moore, with all his faults, might be esteemed; for he had no moral scrofula in his mind, no hopeless polluting taint—such, for instance, as that of falsehood; neither was he the slave of his appetites.

“Here we raise our voices higher, Shout in the refiner’s fire, Clap our hands amidst the flame, Glory give to Jesus’ name!”

The roof of the chapel did not fly off, which speaks volumes in praise of its solid slating.

But if Briar Chapel seemed alive, so also did Briarmains, though certainly the mansion appeared to enjoy a quieter phase of existence than the temple. Some of its windows too were aglow; the lower casements opened upon the lawn;

Mrs. Yorke had that notion, and grave as Saturn she was, morning, noon, and, night; and hard things she thought if any unhappy wight—especially of the female sex—who dared in her presence to show the light of a gay heart on a sunny countenance.

In her estimation, to be mirthful was to be profane, to be cheerful was to be frivolous.

She drew no distinctions. Yet she was a very good wife, a very careful mother, looked after her children unceasingly, was sincerely attached to her husband;

but Matthew is never to be vexed, never to be opposed; they avert provocation from him as assiduously as they would avert fire from a barrel of gunpowder. “Concede, conciliate,” is their motto wherever he is concerned.

The republicans are fast making a tyrant of their own flesh and blood.

This the younger scions know and feel, and at heart they all rebel against the injustice. They cannot read their parents’ motives; they only see the difference of treatment. The dragon’s teeth are already sown amongst Mr. Yorke’s young olive-branches;

The republicans are fast making a tyrant of their own flesh and blood. This the younger scions know and feel, and at heart they all rebel against the injustice. They cannot read their parents’ motives; they only see the difference of treatment.

The dragon’s teeth are already sown amongst Mr. Yorke’s young olive-branches; discord will one day be the harvest.

Mark is a bonny-looking boy, the most regular-featured of the family. He is exceedingly calm; his smile is shrewd; he can say the driest, most cutting things in the quietest of tones.

Poetry will not exist for Mark, either in literature or in life; its best effusions will sound to him mere rant and jargon. Enthusiasm will be his aversion and contempt.

Mark will have no youth; while he looks juvenile and blooming, he will be already middle-aged in mind.

His body is now fourteen years of age, but his soul is already thirty.

its best effusions will sound to him mere rant and jargon. Enthusiasm will be his aversion and contempt. Mark will have no youth; while he looks juvenile and blooming, he will be already middle-aged in mind.

His body is now fourteen years of age, but his soul is already thirty.

Martin, the youngest of the three, owns another nature. Life may, or may not, be brief for him, but it will certainly be brilliant. He will pass through all its illusions, half believe in them, wholly enjoy them, then outlive them.

For your benefit, Mr. Moore, I’ve been looking up the word ‘sentimental’ in the dictionary, and I find it to mean ‘tinctured with sentiment.’ On examining further, ‘sentiment’ is explained to be thought, idea, notion.

A sentimental man, then, is one who has thoughts, ideas, notions; an unsentimental man is one destitute of thought, idea, or notion.

”

Martin went, and Matthew sent another insolent laugh after him. Rose, lifting her fair head from Moore’s shoulder, against which, for a moment, it had been resting, said, as she directed a steady gaze to Matthew, “

Martin is grieved, and you are glad; but I would rather be Martin than you. I dislike your nature.

”

“

Yes; but you might as well say that breath is all a dead man wants to live.

”

“I am not romantic.

I am stripped of romance as bare as the white tenters in that field are of cloth.

”

They do not know what others do in the way of helping, pleasing, or teaching their race; they will not trouble themselves to inquire. Whoever is not in trade is accused of eating the bread of idleness, of passing a useless existence.

Long may it be ere England really becomes a nation of shopkeepers!

We have already said that Moore was no self-sacrificing patriot, and we have also explained what circumstances rendered him specially prone to confine his attention and efforts to the furtherance of his individual interest;

Will he turn his head towards this pew? No, not once. He has not one look for me. That is hard. A kind glance would have made me happy till tomorrow. I have not got it; he would not give it; he is gone.

Strange that grief should now almost choke me, because another human being’s eye has failed to greet mine.

”

but now I perceive plainly I may have been mistaken. Probably I shall be an old maid. I shall live to see Robert married to someone else, some rich lady. I shall never marry.

What was I created for, I wonder? Where is my place in the world?

”

they call them devoted and virtuous. Is this enough? Is it to live?

Is there not a terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving, in that existence which is given away to others, for want of something of your own to bestow it on?

I suspect there is. Does virtue lie in abnegation of self? I do not believe it. Undue humility makes tyranny; weak concession creates selfishness.

Is there not a terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving, in that existence which is given away to others, for want of something of your own to bestow it on? I suspect there is. Does virtue lie in abnegation of self? I do not believe it.

Undue humility makes tyranny; weak concession creates selfishness.

The Romish religion especially teaches renunciation of self, submission to others, and nowhere are found so many grasping tyrants as in the ranks of the Romish priesthood. Each human being has his share of rights.

If her auditress ventured now and then to put in a palliative word she set it aside with a certain disdain. Still, though thus pitiless in moral anatomy, she was no scandalmonger. She never disseminated really malignant or dangerous reports.

It was not her heart so much as her temper that was wrong.

Caroline made this discovery for the first time today, and moved thereby to regret divers unjust judgments she had more than once passed on the crabbed old maid, she began to talk to her softly, not in sympathizing words, but with a sympathizing voice.

Well might she be corpse-like; well might she look grim, and never smile; well might she wish to avoid excitement, to gain and retain composure! Caroline, when she knew all, acknowledged that Miss Mann was rather to be admired for fortitude than blamed for moroseness.

Reader! when you behold an aspect for whose constant gloom and frown you cannot account, whose unvarying cloud exasperates you by its apparent causelessness, be sure that there is a canker somewhere, and a canker not the less deeply corroding because concealed.

Miss Mann felt that she was understood partly, and wished to be understood further;

The loneliness of her condition struck her visitor in a new light, as did also the character of her ugliness—a bloodless pallor of complexion, and deeply worn lines of feature. The girl pitied the solitary and afflicted woman; her looks told what she felt.

A sweet countenance is never so sweet as when the moved heart animates it with compassionate tenderness.

Miss Mann, seeing such a countenance raised to her, was touched in her turn. She acknowledged her sense of the interest thus unexpectedly shown in her, who usually met with only coldness and ridicule, by replying to her candidly.

They would have been hugely mistaken for their pains.

Sincerity is never ludicrous; it is always respectable.

Whether truth—be it religious or moral truth—speak eloquently and in well-chosen language or not, its voice should be heard with reverence.

Yet Caroline refused tamely to succumb. She had native strength in her girl’s heart, and she used it.

Men and women never struggle so hard as when they struggle alone, without witness, counsellor, or confidant, unencouraged, unadvised, and unpitied.

Miss Helstone was in this position. Her sufferings were her only spur, and being very real and sharp, they roused her spirit keenly. Bent on victory over a mortal pain, she did her best to quell it.

She was now precisely in that state when, if her constitution had contained the seeds of consumption, decline, or slow fever, those diseases would have been rapidly developed, and would soon have carried her quietly from the world.

People never die of love or grief alone, though some die of inherent maladies which the tortures of those passions prematurely force into destructive action.

The sound by nature undergo these tortures, and are racked, shaken, shattered; their beauty and bloom perish, but life remains untouched. They are brought to a certain point of dilapidation; they are reduced to pallor, debility, and emaciation.

This does not happen. They live on; and though they cannot regain youth and gaiety, they may regain strength and serenity.

The blossom which the March wind nips, but fails to sweep away, may survive to hang a withered apple on the tree late into autumn: having braved the last frosts of spring, it may also brave the first of winter.

Everyone noticed the change in Miss Helstone’s appearance, and most people said she was going to die. She never thought so herself. She felt in no dying case; she had neither pain nor sickness. Her appetite was diminished; she knew the reason.

“

The countinghouse is better than my bloom-coloured drawing-room. I adore the countinghouse.

”

“

Yes, in company; but he is stern and silent at home. As he puts away his cane and shovel-hat in the rectory hall, so he locks his liveliness in his bookcase and study-desk: the knitted brow and brief word for the fireside; the smile, the jest, the witty sally for society.

”

“No, I could not. There it is. I could never be my own mistress more. A terrible thought! It suffocates me! Nothing irks me like the idea of being a burden and a bore—an inevitable burden, a ceaseless bore!

Now, when I feel my company superfluous, I can comfortably fold my independence round me like a mantle, and drop my pride like a veil, and withdraw to solitude.

If married, that could not be.”

“I would scorn to contend for empire with him—I would scorn it. Shall my left hand dispute for precedence with my right?

Shall my heart quarrel with my pulse? Shall my veins be jealous of the blood which fills them?

”

“I should be glad to see him any day. The higher above me, so much the better.

It degrades to stoop; it is glorious to look up.

What frets me is, that when I try to esteem, I am baffled; when religiously inclined, there are but false gods to adore. I disdain to be a pagan.”

“

No; but it can give varieties of pain, and prevent us from breaking our hearts with a single tyrant master-torture.

Besides, successful labour has its recompense; a vacant, weary, lonely, hopeless life has none.”

The more Robert knows of Shirley the more his soul will cleave to her. They will both be happy, and I do not grudge them their bliss; but I groan under my own misery. Some of my suffering is very acute.

Truly I ought not to have been born; they should have smothered me at the first cry.

”

“

Existence is neither aimless nor hopeless to me now, and it was both three months ago. I was then drowning, and rather wished the operation over.

All at once a hand was stretched to me—such a delicate hand I scarcely dared trust it; its strength, however, has rescued me from ruin.”

tree-shadows will take your shape; in the white sprays of hawthorn I shall imagine glimpses of you.

Lina, you will haunt me.

”

“A pretty expression you have in your countenance,” she went on, still gazing keenly, though not inimically—rather indeed pityingly—at Caroline. “

Wonderfully self-supported you look, you solitude-seeking, wounded deer.

Are you afraid Shirley will worry you if she discovers that you are hurt, and that you bleed?”

affection that no passion can ultimately outrival, with which even love itself cannot do more than compete in force and truth.

Love hurts us so, Shirley. It is so tormenting, so racking, and it burns away our strength with its flame.

In affection is no pain and no fire, only sustenance and balm. I am supported and soothed when you—that is, you only—are near, Shirley. Do you believe me now?”

affection that no passion can ultimately outrival, with which even love itself cannot do more than compete in force and truth. Love hurts us so, Shirley. It is so tormenting, so racking, and it burns away our strength with its flame.

In affection is no pain and no fire, only sustenance and balm.

I am supported and soothed when you—that is, you only—are near, Shirley. Do you believe me now?”

The very curates—who, in their trivial arrogance, were hardly worthy to tie her patten-strings, or carry her cotton umbrella, or check woollen shawl—she, in her pure, sincere enthusiasm, looked upon as sucking saints.

No matter how clearly their little vices and enormous absurdities were pointed out to her, she could not see them; she was blind to ecclesiastical defects; the white surplice covered a multitude of sins.

Shirley, knowing this harmless infatuation on the part of her recently-chosen prime minister, stipulated expressly that the curates were to have no voice in the disposal of the money, that their meddling fingers were not to be inserted into the pie.

It is good for women, especially, to be endowed with a soft blindness; to have mild, dim eyes, that never penetrate below the surface of things—that take all for what it seems.

Thousands, knowing this, keep their eyelids drooped on system; but the most downcast glance has its loophole, through which it can, on occasion, take its sentinel-survey of life.

I remember once seeing a pair of blue eyes, that were usually thought sleepy, secretly on the alert, and I knew by their expression—an expression which chilled my blood, it was in that quarter so wondrously unexpected—that for years they had been accustomed to silent …

He had come, indeed, for the express purpose of making himself charming and fascinating. Rough portents had met him on his first admission to Fieldhead; but that passage got over, charming and fascinating he resolved to be.

Like March, having come in like a lion, he purposed to go out like a lamb.

For the sake of air, as it appeared, or perhaps for that of ready exit in case of some new emergency arising, he took his seat—not on the sofa, where Miss Keeldar offered him enthronization, nor yet near the fireside, to which Caroline, by a …

“

Off! Were you an archbishop you have proved yourself no gentleman, and must go. Quick!

”

“

How dare the pompous priest abuse his flock! How dare the lisping cockney revile Yorkshire!

” was her sole observation on the circumstance, as she returned to the table.

The churchyard is full of children and teachers, all in their very best holiday attire; and, distressed as is the district, bad as are the times, it is wonderful to see how respectably, how handsomely even, they have contrived to clothe themselves.

That British love of decency will work miracles.

The poverty which reduces an Irish girl to rags is impotent to rob the English girl of the neat wardrobe she knows necessary to her self-respect.

And who, after this, could dare to say that Peter was not a lady’s man? He had gathered and he had given flowers; he had offered a sentimental, a poetic tribute at the shrine of Love or Mammon.

Hercules holding the distaff was but a faint type of Peter bearing the roses.

He must have thought this himself, for he seemed amazed at what he had done. He backed without a word; he was going away with a husky chuckle of self-satisfaction;

Let England’s priests have their due. They are a faulty set in some respects, being only of common flesh and blood like us all; but the land would be badly off without them.

Britain would miss her church, if that church fell. God save it! God also reform it!

“Not quite without effort; I am already tired of the exertion. It is but insipid, barren work, talking and laughing with the good gentlefolks of Briarfield. I have been looking out for your white dress for the last ten minutes.

I like to watch those I love in a crowd, and to compare them with others.

I have thus compared you. You resemble none of the rest, Lina. There are some prettier faces than yours here.

Caroline said this as Miss Keeldar seized her arm and hurried her down the fields. It was vain to contend.

Nothing was so wilful as Shirley when she took a whim into her head.

Caroline found herself out of sight of the crowd almost before she was aware, and ushered into a narrow shady spot, embowered above with hawthorns, and enamelled under foot with daisies.

“

Love a crime! No, Shirley; love is a divine virtue.

But why drag that word into the conversation? It is singularly irrelevant.”

“

Obtrusiveness is a crime, forwardness is a crime, and both disgust; but love! no purest angel need blush to love.

And when I see or hear either man or woman couple shame with love, I know their minds are coarse, their associations debased.

He’ll not forget the battle of Royd Lane. I shall be sorry also to deprive you of Mr. Hall’s sincere friendly homily, with all its racy Yorkshireisms; but here I must stay.

The gray church and grayer tombs look divine with this crimson gleam on them. Nature is now at her evening prayers; she is kneeling before those red hills.

I see her prostrate on the great steps of her altar, praying for a fair night for mariners at sea, for travellers in deserts, for lambs on moors, and unfledged birds in woods.

Angels serried before him their battalions; the long lines of adamantine shields flashed back on his blind eyeballs the unutterable splendour of heaven. Devils gathered their legions in his sight; their dim, discrowned, and tarnished armies passed rank and file before him.

Milton tried to see the first woman; but, Cary, he saw her not.

”

… the strength which could bear a thousand years of bondage, the vitality which could feed that vulture death through uncounted ages, the unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immortality, which, after millenniums of crimes, struggles, and woes, could conceive and bring forth a Messiah.

The first woman was heaven-born.

Vast was the heart whence gushed the wellspring of the blood of nations, and grand the undegenerate head where rested the consort-crown of creation.”

“

More shame to Adam to sin with his eyes open!

” cried Miss Keeldar. “To confess the honest truth, Joe, I never was easy in my mind concerning that chapter. It puzzles me.”

“I dare say it will.

My notions are dyed in faster colours than yours, Joe.

Mr. Scott, you are a thoroughly dogmatical person, and always were. I like William better than you.”

Miss Keeldar clasped her round the waist with both arms and held her back. “Not one step shall you stir,” she went on authoritatively. “At this moment Moore would be both shocked and embarrassed if he saw either you or me.

Men never want women near them in time of real danger.

”

“As queen of his heart?

His mill is his ladylove, Cary!

Backed by his factory and his frames, he has all the encouragement he wants or can know. It is not for love or beauty, but for ledger and broadcloth, he is going to break a spear. Don’t be sentimental; Robert is not so.”

the lion shakes his mane, and rises to the howl of the hyena; caste stands up, ireful against caste; and the indignant, wronged spirit of the middle rank bears down in zeal and scorn on the famished and furious mass of the operative class.

It is difficult to be tolerant, difficult to be just, in such moments.

Caroline rose; Shirley put her arm round her: they stood together as still as the straight stems of two trees. That yell was a long one, and when it ceased the night was yet full of the swaying and murmuring of a crowd.

Miss Keeldar’s countenance changed at this view. It was the aftertaste of the battle, death and pain replacing excitement and exertion.

It was the blackness the bright fire leaves when its blaze is sunk, its warmth failed, and its glow faded.

“This is what I wished to prevent,” she said, in a voice whose cadence betrayed the altered impulse of her heart.

… the rectory before—and though the recent scene was one unparalleled for excitement and terror by any it had hitherto been her lot to witness, yet scarce was her head laid on the pillow ere a deep, refreshing sleep closed her eyes and calmed her senses.

Perfect health was Shirley’s enviable portion.

Though warmhearted and sympathetic, she was not nervous; powerful emotions could rouse and sway without exhausting her spirit. The tempest troubled and shook her while it lasted, but it left her elasticity unbent, and her freshness quite unblighted.

And this is the way men deal with women—still concealing danger from them—thinking, I suppose, to spare them pain. They imagined we little knew where they were tonight. We know they little conjectured where we were.

Men, I believe, fancy women’s minds something like those of children. Now, that is a mistake.

”

“If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women. They do not read them in a true light; they misapprehend them, both for good and evil.

Their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend.

Then to hear them fall into ecstasies with each other’s creations—worshipping the heroine of such a poem, novel, drama—thinking it fine, divine! Fine and divine it may be, but often quite artificial—false as the rose in my best bonnet there.

“Not at all.

Women read men more truly than men read women.

I’ll prove that in a magazine paper some day when I’ve time; only it will never be inserted. It will be ‘declined with thanks,’ and left for me at the publisher’s.”

“

God knows I can’t contradict you, Cary; I’m as ignorant as a stone.

There’s one comfort, however: you are not much better.”

“Talking a bit! Just like you!” said Shirley. “It is a queer thing all the world is so fond of talking over events.

You talk if anybody dies suddenly; you talk if a fire breaks out; you talk if a mill-owner fails; you talk if he’s murdered. What good does your talking do?

”

“It is a queer thing all the world is so fond of talking over events. You talk if anybody dies suddenly; you talk if a fire breaks out; you talk if a mill-owner fails; you talk if he’s murdered. What good does your talking do?”

There is nothing the lower orders like better than a little downright good-humoured rating.

Flattery they scorn very much; honest abuse they enjoy. They call it speaking plainly, and take a sincere delight in being the objects thereof. The homely harshness of Miss Keeldar’s salutation won her the ear of the whole throng in a second.

There is nothing the lower orders like better than a little downright good-humoured rating.

Flattery they scorn very much; honest abuse they enjoy.

They call it speaking plainly, and take a sincere delight in being the objects thereof. The homely harshness of Miss Keeldar’s salutation won her the ear of the whole throng in a second.

Come, friends,” she added, changing at once from bluntness to courtesy, “oblige me by taking your cans and going home. I expect several persons to call today, and it will be inconvenient to have the avenues to the house crowded.”

Yorkshire people are as yielding to persuasion as they are stubborn against compulsion.

The yard was clear in five minutes.

“So Mr. Helstone domiciled me at the rectory! Mighty clever you gentlemen think you are! I make you heartily welcome to the idea, and hope its savour, as you chew the cud of reflection upon it, gives you pleasure.

Acute and astute, why are you not also omniscient?

How is it that events transpire, under your very noses, of which you have no suspicion? It should be so, otherwise the exquisite gratification of outmanoeuvring you would be unknown. Ah, friend, you may search my countenance, but you cannot read it.”

Acute and astute, why are you not also omniscient? How is it that events transpire, under your very noses, of which you have no suspicion? It should be so, otherwise the exquisite gratification of outmanoeuvring you would be unknown.

Ah, friend, you may search my countenance, but you cannot read it.

”

I believe it would merely annoy and frighten me were he to be affectionate towards me now. But you know, Mrs. Pryor, it is scarcely living to measure time as I do at the rectory.

The hours pass, and I get them over somehow, but I do not live. I endure existence, but I rarely enjoy it.

Since Miss Keeldar and you came I have been—I was going to say happier, but that would be untrue.” She paused.

“My dear, it is very bitter. It is said to be strong—strong as death!

Most of the cheats of existence are strong.

As to their sweetness, nothing is so transitory; its date is a moment, the twinkling of an eye. The sting remains forever. It may perish with the dawn of eternity, but it tortures through time into its deepest night.”

“Nothing whatever, my dear,” assented Mrs. Pryor eagerly, “nor of marriage; and the false pictures they give of those subjects cannot be too strongly condemned. They are not like reality.

They show you only the green, tempting surface of the marsh, and give not one faithful or truthful hint of the slough underneath.

”

they grow altogether morbid. I do fear death as yet, but I believe it is because I am young. Poor Miss Ainley would cling closer to life if life had more charms for her.

God surely did not create us and cause us to live with the sole end of wishing always to die.

I believe in my heart we were intended to prize life and enjoy it so long as we retain it.

God surely did not create us and cause us to live with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe in my heart we were intended to prize life and enjoy it so long as we retain it.

Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me among the rest.

“Nobody,” she went on—“nobody in particular is to blame, that I can see, for the state in which things are; and I cannot tell, however much I puzzle over it, how they are to be altered for the better;

Lucretia, spinning at midnight in the midst of her maidens, and Solomon’s virtuous woman are often quoted as patterns of what ‘the sex,’ as they say, ought to be. I don’t know.

Lucretia, I dare say, was a most worthy sort of person, much like my cousin Hortense Moore; but she kept her servants up very late.

I should not have liked to be amongst the number of the maidens. Hortense would just work me and Sarah in that fashion, if she could, and neither of us would bear it.

You would wish to be proud of your daughters, and not to blush for them; then seek for them an interest and an occupation which shall raise them above the flirt, the manoeuvrer, the mischief-making talebearer.

Keep your girls’ minds narrow and fettered; they will still be a plague and a care, sometimes a disgrace to you.

Cultivate them—give them scope and work; they will be your gayest companions in health, your tenderest nurses in sickness, your most faithful prop in age.”

I say impotent, for I observe that to such grievances as society cannot readily cure it usually forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn, this scorn being only a sort of tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness.

People hate to be reminded of ills they are unable or unwilling to remedy.

Such reminder, in forcing on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of an obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their ease and shakes their self-complacency.

Had she known clearly to whose account the chief share of this childlike joy was to be placed, Hortense would most likely have felt both shocked and incensed.

Sisters do not like young ladies to fall in love with their brothers.

It seems, if not presumptuous, silly, weak, a delusion, an absurd mistake. They do not love these gentlemen—whatever sisterly affection they may cherish towards them—and that others should, repels them with a sense of crude romance.

“First this hemisphere where we live; then the other.

I am resolved that my life shall be a life.

Not a black trance like the toad’s, buried in marble; nor a long, slow death like yours in Briarfield rectory.”

“

I don’t know; but I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.

”

“

Better to try all things and find all empty than to try nothing and leave your life a blank.

To do this is to commit the sin of him who buried his talent in a napkin—despicable sluggard!”

“

Of course I should often be influenced by my feelings. They were given me to that end.

Whom my feelings teach me to love I must and shall love; and I hope, if ever I have a husband and children, my feelings will induce me to love them.

“

Clever little Oedipus! you would have baffled the Sphinx!

But now, see us together.—Change places; change again, to confuse her, Louis.—Which is the old love now, Lina?”

With all this care it seemed strange the sick girl did not get well; yet such was the case.

She wasted like any snow-wreath in thaw; she faded like any flower in drought.

Miss Keeldar, on whose thoughts danger or death seldom intruded, had at first entertained no fears at all for her friend; but seeing her change and sink from time to time when she paid her visits, alarm clutched her heart. She went to Mr.

“I smelt the honeysuckles in the glen this summer morning,” she said, “as I stood at the countinghouse window.”

Strange words like these from pallid lips pierce a loving listener’s heart more poignantly than steel. They sound romantic, perhaps, in books; in real life they are harrowing.

“My darling, do you know me?” said Mrs. Pryor.

“

O child, the human heart can suffer! It can hold more tears than the ocean holds waters.

We never know how deep, how wide it is, till misery begins to unbind her clouds, and fill it with rushing blackness.”

“Forget!” she said, with the strangest spectre of a laugh. “

The north pole will rush to the south, and the headlands of Europe be locked into the bays of Australia ere I forget.

”

“It is spoken like a sage, Cary. See if I don’t cater for you judiciously.

When women are sensible, and, above all, intelligible, I can get on with them.

It is only the vague, superfine sensations, and extremely wire-drawn notions, that put me about. Let a woman ask me to give her an edible or a wearable—be the same a roc’s egg or the breastplate of Aaron, a share of St.

“You don’t; you can’t. Mamma, I am sorry papa was not good. I do so wish he had been.

Wickedness spoils and poisons all pleasant things. It kills love.

If you and I thought each other wicked, we could not love each other, could we?”

These importunities were the mother’s pleasure. If ever she delayed compliance, it was only to hear them repeated, and to enjoy her child’s soft, half-playful, half-petulant urgency. And then, when she yielded, Caroline would say archly, “

You will spoil me, mamma. I always thought I should like to be spoiled, and I find it very sweet.

” So did Mrs. Pryor.

and we will let him alone. Cry away, Cary; it will do you good. It is wrong to check natural tears. Besides, I choose to please myself by sharing an idea that at this moment beams in your mother’s eye while she looks at you.

Every drop blots out a sin. Weep! your tears have the virtue which the rivers of Damascus lacked.

Like Jordan, they can cleanse a leprous memory.”

“

I may be communicative, yet know where to stop.

In showing my treasure I may withhold a gem or two—a curious, unbought graven stone—an amulet of whose mystic glitter I rarely permit even myself a glimpse. Good day.”

“Scrupulous care I will take, Mr. Sympson. Before I marry I am resolved to esteem—to admire—to love.”

“To love with my whole heart. I know I speak in an unknown tongue; but I feel indifferent whether I am comprehended or not.”

“And if this love of yours should fall on a beggar?”

“Console yourself, uncle. Were Britain a serfdom and you the Czar, you could not compel me to this step. I will write to Mr. Wynne. Give yourself no further trouble on the subject.”

Fortune is proverbially called changeful, yet her caprice often takes the form of repeating again and again a similar stroke of luck in the same quarter.

It appeared that Miss Keeldar—or her fortune—had by this time made a sensation in the district, and produced an impression in quarters by her unthought of. No less than three offers followed Mr. Wynne’s, all more or less eligible.

It was well her face owned an agreeable outline, and that her cheek possessed the polish and the roundness of early youth, or, thus robbed of a softening shade, the contours might have lost their grace. But what mattered that in the present society?

Neither Calypso nor Eucharis cared to fascinate Mentor.

She began to read. The language had become strange to her tongue; it faltered; the lecture flowed unevenly, impeded by hurried breath, broken by Anglicized tones. She stopped.

“

One man in times of old, it is said, imparted vitality to the statue he had chiselled; others may have the contrary gift of turning life to stone.

”

“

I approve nothing utopian. Look Life in its iron face; stare Reality out of its brassy countenance.

Make the tea, Henry; I shall be back in a minute.”

“I can live alone, if need be.

But the question is not how to live, but how to die alone. That strikes me in a more grisly light.

”

“For my part, I am almost contented just now, and very thankful.

Gratitude is a divine emotion. It fills the heart, but not to bursting; it warms it, but not to fever.

I like to taste leisurely of bliss. Devoured in haste, I do not know its flavour.”

“Wholly. As I was two hours since, and as I am now, are two different states of existence.

I believe, Mr. Moore, griefs and fears nursed in silence grow like Titan infants.

”

“I am aware,” said Louis, “that he had an interview with you the evening before he left, and I saw him quit Fieldhead afterwards. I read his countenance, or tried to read it. He turned from me. I divined that he would be long away.

Some fine, slight fingers have a wondrous knack at pulverizing a man’s brittle pride.

I suppose Robert put too much trust in his manly beauty and native gentlemanhood. Those are better off who, being destitute of advantage, cannot cherish delusion. But I will write, and say you advise his return.”

“Her mark,” he said. “Here she has been—careless, attractive thing!—called away in haste, doubtless, and forgetting to return and put all to rights.

Why does she leave fascination in her footprints?

Whence did she acquire the gift to be heedless and never offend?

There is always something to chide in her, and the reprimand never settles in displeasure on the heart, but, for her lover or her husband, when it had trickled a while in words, would naturally melt from his lips in a kiss.

Better pass half an hour in remonstrating with her than a day in admiring or praising any other woman alive.

Am I muttering? soliloquizing? Stop that.”

If one thing smoothed, soothed, and charmed him especially, it was the spectacle of a public character incapable of relishing his publicity—incapable, I say.

Disdain would but have incensed; it was indifference that appeased his rough spirit.

Robert, leaning back in his chair, quiet and almost surly, while the clothiers and blanket-makers vaunted his prowess and rehearsed his deeds—many of them interspersing their flatteries with coarse invectives against the operative class—was a delectable sight for Mr. Yorke.

Yorke. His heart tingled with the pleasing conviction that these gross eulogiums shamed Moore deeply, and made him half scorn himself and his work.

On abuse, on reproach, on calumny, it is easy to smile; but painful indeed is the panegyric of those we contemn.

Often had Moore gazed with a brilliant countenance over howling crowds from a hostile hustings. He had breasted the storm of unpopularity with gallant bearing and soul elate; but he drooped his head under the half-bred tradesmen’s praise, and shrank chagrined before their congratulations.

“ ‘God bless me!’ she piteously repeated, in that shocked, indignant, yet saddened accent. ‘You have made a strange proposal—strange from you; and if you knew how strangely you worded it and looked it, you would be startled at yourself.

You spoke like a brigand who demanded my purse rather than like a lover who asked my heart.

’

“A queer sentence, was it not, Yorke? And I knew, as she uttered it, it was true as queer.

Her words were a mirror in which I saw myself.

“I looked at her, dumb and wolfish. She at once enraged and shamed me.

but I should do it now chiefly for the sake and the security of those he misled. Something there is to look to, Yorke, beyond a man’s personal interest, beyond the advancement of well-laid schemes, beyond even the discharge of dishonouring debts.

To respect himself, a man must believe he renders justice to his fellow-men.

Unless I am more considerate to ignorance, more forbearing to suffering, than I have hitherto been, I shall scorn myself as grossly unjust.—What now?”

What made her sing so? They never sang so. Was it proper to sing with such expression, with such originality—so unlike a schoolgirl? Decidedly not. It was strange, it was unusual.

What was strange must be wrong; what was unusual must be improper.

Shirley was judged.

“Sincerely speaking, I am sorry, uncle, you are so disappointed.”

Concession, contrition, never do any good with some people. Instead of softening and conciliating, they but embolden and harden them.

Of that number was Mr. Sympson.

“He is very amiable—very excellent—truly estimable; but not my master—not in one point. I could not trust myself with his happiness. I would not undertake the keeping of it for thousands.

I will accept no hand which cannot hold me in check.

”

“You no taste for swaggering, and subduing, and ordering, and ruling?”

“Not my husband; only my uncle.”

“There is a slight difference—that is certain. And I know full well any man who wishes to live in decent comfort with me as a husband must be able to control me.”

“

My husband must be thirty, with the sense of forty.

”

“You and Henry rave about poetry! You used to catch fire like tinder on the subject when you were a girl.”

“O uncle, there is nothing really valuable in this world, there is nothing glorious in the world to come that is not poetry!”

“Marry a poet, then, in God’s name!”

“

Your god, sir, is the world. In my eyes you too, if not an infidel, are an idolater.

I conceive that you ignorantly worship; in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon.

She had wept in slumber; or perhaps, before dropping asleep, a few natural tears had fallen after she had heard that epithet. No man—no woman—is always strong, always able to bear up against the unjust opinion, the vilifying word.

Calumny, even from the mouth of a fool, will sometimes cut into unguarded feelings.

Shirley looked like a child that had been naughty and punished, but was now forgiven and at rest.

“I thought I should have had to support her,” he said, as he walked towards Briarmains, “and it is she who has made me strong. That look of pity, that gentle touch! No down was ever softer, no elixir more potent!

It lay like a snowflake; it thrilled like lightning.

A thousand times I have longed to possess that hand—to have it in mine. I have possessed it; for five minutes I held it. Her fingers and mine can never be strangers more. Having met once they must meet again.”

but an attempted murder near her door—a half-murdered man in her best bed—set her straight, cheered her spirits, gave her cap the dash of a turban.

Mrs. Yorke was just the woman who, while rendering miserable the drudging life of a simple maidservant, would nurse like a heroine a hospital full of plague patients.

She almost loved Moore. Her tough heart almost yearned towards him when she found him committed to her charge—left in her arms, as dependent on her as her youngest-born in the cradle.

The thought is hardly hatched in his mind when the lady retraces those two steps she had got beyond him, and raising her veil, reposes her glance on his face, while she softly asks, “Are you one of Mr. Yorke’s sons?”

No human evidence would ever have been able to persuade Martin Yorke that he blushed when thus addressed; yet blush he did, to the ears.

“I am,” he said bluntly, and encouraged himself to wonder, superciliously, what would come next.

“She is my debtor, and I will be paid.”

He flattered himself that it was opportunity, not audacity, which had failed him. He misjudged the quality of his own nature, and held it for something lower than it was.

“My father has more sense than my mother,” he pronounced. “

How women miss it! They drive the nail into the flesh, thinking they are hammering away at insensate stone.

”

She will want to get a word respecting her confounded sweetheart, as I want to get another flavour of what I think the essence of life—a taste of existence, with the spirit preserved in it, and not evaporated.

Adventure is to stagnation what champagne is to flat porter.

”

“Six months ago I passed out at this gate,” said he, “a proud, angry, disappointed man. I come back sadder and wiser; weakly enough, but not worried.

A cold, gray, yet quiet world lies round⁠—a world where, if I hope little, I fear nothing.

All slavish terrors of embarrassment have left me. Let the worst come, I can work, as Joe Scott does, for an honourable living; in such doom I yet see some hardship but no degradation. Formerly, pecuniary ruin was equivalent in my eyes to personal dishonour.

All slavish terrors of embarrassment have left me. Let the worst come, I can work, as Joe Scott does, for an honourable living; in such doom I yet see some hardship but no degradation.

Formerly, pecuniary ruin was equivalent in my eyes to personal dishonour. It is not so now; I know the difference.

Ruin is an evil, but one for which I am prepared; the day of whose coming I know, for I have calculated. I can yet put it off six months—not an hour longer. If things by that time alter, which is not probable;

“

Like a shrine, for it was holy; like snow, for it was pure; like flame, for it was warm; like death, for it was strong.

”

“Whatever I am, Shirley is a bondswoman. Lioness, she has found her captor.

Mistress she may be of all round her, but her own mistress she is not.

”

“But then she is handsome, peculiarly handsome. Hers is a beauty that grows on you.

You think her but graceful when you first see her; you discover her to be beautiful when you have known her for a year.

”

“

Because you most wish to retain when you are most certain to lose.

”