The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft quotes

For more than a week my pen has lain untouched.

I have written nothing for seven whole days, not even a letter.

Except during one or two bouts of illness, such a thing never happened in my life before. In my life; the life, that is, which had to be supported by anxious toil;

The exquisite quiet of this room!

I have been sitting in utter idleness, watching the sky, viewing the shape of golden sunlight upon the carpet, which changes as the minutes pass, letting my eye wander from one framed print to another, and along the ranks of my beloved books.

Sixpence dropped by the wayside, and a whole family made wretched! What are the due descriptive terms for a state of “civilization” in which such a thing as this is possible?

I put my hand into my pocket, and wrought sixpennyworth of miracle.

It took me half an hour to recover my quiet mind. After all, it is as idle to rage against man’s fatuity as to hope that he will ever be less a fool. For me, the great thing was my sixpenny miracle.

that most of the good which saves mankind from destruction comes of life that is led in thoughtful stillness.

Every day the world grows noisier; I, for one, will have no part in that increasing clamour, and, were it only by my silence, I confer a boon on all.

How well would the revenues of a country be expended, if, by mere pensioning, one-fifth of its population could be induced to live as I do!

friends I might have made have remained strangers to me; solitude of the bitter kind, the solitude which is enforced at times when mind or heart longs for companionship, often cursed my life solely because I was poor.

I think it would scarce be an exaggeration to say that there is no moral good which has not to be paid for in coin of the realm.

“Poverty,” said Johnson again, “is so great an evil, and pregnant with so much temptation, so much misery, that I cannot but earnestly enjoin you to avoid it.”

How many more springs can I hope to see? A sanguine temper would say ten or twelve; let me dare to hope humbly for five or six.

That is a great many. Five or six spring-times, welcomed joyously, lovingly watched from the first celandine to the budding of the rose; who shall dare to call it a stinted boon?

I wonder where that comes from. I found it once in Charron, quoted without reference, and it has often been in my mind—a dreary truth, well worded. At least, it was a truth for me during many a long year.

Life, I fancy, would very often be insupportable, but for the luxury of self-compassion; in cases numberless, this it must be that saves from suicide.

For some there is great relief in talking about their miseries, but such gossips lack the profound solace of misery nursed in silent brooding. Happily, the trick with me has never been retrospective;

It is because nations tend to stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.

In my youth, looking at this man and that, I marvelled that humanity had made so little progress.

Now, looking at men in the multitude, I marvel that they have advanced so far.

In my youth, looking at this man and that, I marvelled that humanity had made so little progress.

Now, looking at men in the multitude, I marvel that they have advanced so far.

Foolishly arrogant as I was, I used to judge the worth of a person by his intellectual power and attainment. I could see no good where there was no logic, no charm where there was no learning.

She is fulfilling the offices for which she was born, and that with a grace of contentment, a joy of conscientiousness, which puts her high among civilized beings.

Her delight is in order and in peace; what greater praise can be given to any of the children of men?

The other day she told me a story of the days gone by. Her mother, at the age of twelve, went into domestic service; but on what conditions, think you?

Every morning when I awake, I thank heaven for silence.

This is my orison. I remember the London days when sleep was broken by clash and clang, by roar and shriek, and when my first sense on returning to consciousness was hatred of the life about me.

Let me but come upon the poorest little woodcut, the cheapest “process” illustration, representing a thatched cottage, a lane, a field, and I hear that music begin to murmur. It is a passion—Heaven be thanked—that grows with my advancing years.

The last thought of my brain as I lie dying will be that of sunshine upon an English meadow.

the whole tenor of his writing proves that he represents, and consciously, one of the forces which go to bring war about; his part in the business is a fluent irresponsibility, which casts scorn on all who reluct at the “inevitable.”

Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.

But I will read no more such writing. This resolution I make and will keep. Why set my nerves quivering with rage, and spoil the calm of a whole day, when no good of any sort can come of it?

This resolution I make and will keep. Why set my nerves quivering with rage, and spoil the calm of a whole day, when no good of any sort can come of it? What is it to me if nations fall a-slaughtering each other?

Let the fools go to it! Why should they not please themselves?

Peace, after all, is the aspiration of the few; so it always; was, and ever will be. But have done with the nauseous cant about “dire calamity.” The leaders and the multitude hold no such view;

I read much less than I used to do; I think much more.

Yet what is the use of thought which can no longer serve to direct life? Better, perhaps, to read and read incessantly, losing one’s futile self in the activity of other minds.

No, no; what I remember is just one moment of my earlier life, linked by accident with that picture of the Suffolk landscape. The place no longer exists; it never existed save for me.

For it is the mind which creates the world about us, and, even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched.

Of course the association with old Chaucer, who speaks of Topsham sailors, helps my mood. I came home very tired; but I am not yet decrepit, and for that I must be thankful.

The unspeakable blessedness of having a home!

Much as my imagination has dwelt upon it for thirty years, I never knew how deep and exquisite a joy could lie in the assurance that one is at home forever. Again and again I come back upon this thought;

Cyres. I begin to pride myself on knowing every road and lane, every bridle path and foot-way for miles about. I like to learn the names of farms and of fields. And all this because here is my abiding place, because I am home forever.

It seems to me that the very clouds that pass above my house are more interesting and beautiful than clouds elsewhere.

And to think that at one time I called myself a socialist, communist, anything you like of the revolutionary kind! Not for long, to be sure, and I suspect that there was always something in me that scoffed when my lips uttered such things.

or when, at the Academy, I was astonished to find that it was four o’clock, and I had forgotten food since breakfast.

The truth is, I do not much enjoy anything nowadays which I cannot enjoy alone.

It sounds morose; I imagine the comment of good people if they overheard such a confession. Ought I, in truth, to be ashamed of it?

Whether does my full heart turn to the great Enchanter, or to the Island upon which he has laid his spell? I know not. I cannot think of them apart. In the love and reverence awakened by that voice of voices,

Shakespeare and England are but one.

I could reach them down from my shelves at the moment when I hungered for them. But it often happens that the book which comes into my mind could only be procured with trouble and delay; I breathe regretfully and put aside the thought.

Ah! the books that one will never read again.

They gave delight, perchance something more; they left a perfume in the memory; but life has passed them by forever. I have but to muse, and one after another they rise before me. Books gentle and quieting; books noble and inspiring;

Do I really believe that at any time of my life I have been the kind of man who merits affection? I think not. I have always been much too self-absorbed; too critical of all about me; too unreasonably proud.

Such men as I live and die alone, however much in appearance accompanied.

I do not repine at it; nay, lying day after day in solitude and silence, I have felt glad that it was so. At least I give no one trouble, and that is much.

Boy and man, I blundered into every ditch and bog which lay within sight of my way. Never did silly mortal reap such harvest of experience; never had anyone so many bruises to show for it.

Thwack, thwack! No sooner had I recovered from one sound drubbing than I put myself in the way of another.

“Unpractical” I was called by those who spoke mildly; “idiot”—I am sure—by many a ruder tongue. And idiot I see myself, whenever I glance back over the long, devious road.

True; but I have always regarded as a fact of infinite pathos the ability men have to subdue themselves to the conditions of life.

Contentment so often means resignation, abandonment of the hope seen to be forbidden.

I cannot resolve this doubt.

There comes to me no touch of sadness; whether it be a little child or an aged man, I have the same sense of happy accomplishment; the end having come, and with it the eternal peace, what matter if it came late or soon?

There is no such gratulation as Hic jacet. There is no such dignity as that of death.

In the path trodden by the noblest of mankind these have followed; that which of all who live is the utmost thing demanded, these have achieved. I cannot sorrow for them, but the thought of their vanished life moves me to a brotherly tenderness.

Blackberries hanging thick upon the hedge bring to my memory something of long ago.

I had somehow escaped into the country, and on a long walk began to feel midday hunger. The wayside brambles were fruiting; I picked and ate, and ate on, until I had come within sight of an inn where I might have made a meal.

The average educated man has never stood alone, utterly alone, just clad and nothing more than that, with the problem before him of wresting his next meal from a world that cares not whether he live or die.

There is no such school of political economy.

Go through that course of lectures, and you will never again become confused as to the meaning of elementary terms in that sorry science.

For me, were I to live another fifty years, this security would be a delightful surprise renewed with every renewal of day.

I know, as only one with my experience can, all that is involved in the possession of means to live.

The average educated man has never stood alone, utterly alone, just clad and nothing more than that, with the problem before him of wresting his next meal from a world that cares not whether he live or die.

which I should have accepted as little short of the ideal, would have been to them—if they could have been made to understand it—a weariness and a contempt. To ally myself with them against the “upper world” would have been mere dishonesty, or sheer despair.

What they at heart desired, was to me barren; what I coveted, was to them forever incomprehensible.

That my own aim indicated an ideal which is the best for all to pursue, I am far from maintaining. It may be so, or not; I have long known the idleness of advocating reform on a basis of personal predilection.

I should no further criticize him than to say that he saw with other eyes than mine. A vision, perhaps, larger and more just. But in one respect he resembles me.

If ever such a man arises, let him be questioned; it will be found that he once made a meal of blackberries⁠—and mused upon it.

But then, no wine ever much rejoiced me save that of Italy.

Wine-drinking in England is, after all, only make-believe, a mere playing with an exotic inspiration.

Tennyson had his port, whereto clings a good old tradition; sherris sack belongs to a nobler age; these drinks are not for us. Let him who will, toy with dubious Bordeaux or Burgundy;

As I walked today in the golden sunlight—this warm, still day on the far verge of autumn—there suddenly came to me a thought which checked my step, and for the moment half bewildered me.

I said to myself: My life is over.

Surely I ought to have been aware of that simple fact; certainly it has made part of my meditation, has often coloured my mood; but the thing had never definitely shaped itself, ready in words for the tongue. My life is over.

certainly it has made part of my meditation, has often coloured my mood; but the thing had never definitely shaped itself, ready in words for the tongue. My life is over. I uttered the sentence once or twice, that my ear might test its truth.

Truth undeniable, however strange; undeniable as the figure of my age last birthday.

My age? At this time of life, many a man is bracing himself for new efforts, is calculating on a decade or two of pursuit and attainment. I, too, may perhaps live for some years; but for me there is no more activity, no ambition.

I have had no time; I have only been preparing myself—a mere apprentice to life. My brain is at some prank; I am suffering a momentary delusion; I shall shake myself, and return to common sense—to my schemes and activities and eager enjoyments.

Nevertheless, my life is over.

What a little thing! I knew how the philosophers had spoken; I repeated their musical phrases about the mortal span—yet never till now believed them. And this is all? A man’s life can be so brief and so vain?

I have “retired,” and for me as truly as for the retired tradesman, life is over. I can look back upon its completed course, and what a little thing!

I am tempted to laugh; I hold myself within the limit of a smile.

And that is best, to smile, not in scorn, but in all forbearance, without too much self-compassion. After all, that dreadful aspect of the thing never really took hold of me; I could put it by without much effort. Life is done—and what matter?

I could imagine a man who, by living alone and at peace, came to regard the everyday world as not really existent, but a creation of his own fancy in unsound moments.

What lunatic ever dreamt of things less consonant with the calm reason than those which are thought and done every minute in every community of men called sane?

But I put aside this reflection as soon as may be; it perturbs me fruitlessly. Then I listen to the sounds about my cottage, always soft, soothing, such as lead the mind to gentle thoughts. Sometimes I can hear nothing;

But I put aside this reflection as soon as may be; it perturbs me fruitlessly. Then I listen to the sounds about my cottage, always soft, soothing, such as lead the mind to gentle thoughts.

Sometimes I can hear nothing; not the rustle of a leaf, not the buzz of a fly, and then I think that utter silence is best of all.

This morning I was awakened by a continuous sound which presently shaped itself to my ear as a multitudinous shrilling of bird voices. I knew what it meant.

but that was a mistake. One cannot burn logs successfully in a small room; either the fire, being kept moderate, needs constant attention, or its triumphant blaze makes the room too hot.

A fire is a delightful thing, a companion and an inspiration.

If my room were kept warm by some wretched modern contrivance of water-pipes or heated air, would it be the same to me as that beautiful core of glowing fuel, which, if I sit and gaze into it, becomes a world of wonders?

The warm glow is reflected on shining wood, on my chair, my writing-table, on the bookcases, and from the gilt title of some stately volume; it illumes this picture, it half disperses the gloom on that.

I could imagine that, as in a fairy tale, the books do but await my departure to begin talking among themselves.

A little tongue of flame shoots up from a dying ember; shadows shift upon the ceiling and the walls. With a sigh of utter contentment, I go forth, and shut the door softly.

In the days gone by, I have sometimes given money, but with trembling of another kind; it was as likely as not that I myself, some black foggy morning, might have to go begging for my own dire needs.

That is one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be generous.

Of my abundance—abundance to me, though starveling pittance in the view of everyday prosperity—I can give with happiest freedom; I feel myself a man, and no crouching slave with his back ever ready for the lash of circumstance.

I feel myself a man, and no crouching slave with his back ever ready for the lash of circumstance. There are those, I know, who thank the gods amiss, and most easily does this happen in the matter of wealth.

But oh, how good it is to desire little, and to have a little more than enough!

I have much ado to believe that I really felt so. But then, if life had not somehow made itself tolerable to me, how should I have lived through those many years?

Human creatures have a marvellous power of adapting themselves to necessity.

Were I, even now, thrown back into squalid London, with no choice but to abide and work there—should I not abide and work? Notwithstanding thoughts of the chemist’s shop, I suppose I should.

Beneath simple roofs, the hour of tea has something in it of sacred; for it marks the end of domestic work and worry, the beginning of restful, sociable evening.

The mere chink of cups and saucers tunes the mind to happy repose.

I care nothing for your five o’clock tea of modish drawing-rooms, idle and wearisome like all else in which that world has part; I speak of tea where one is at home in quite another than the worldly sense.

But well indeed do I see the faces of the guests—poor clerks and shopboys, bloodless girls and women of many sorts—all endeavouring to find a relish in lentil soup and haricot something-or-other. It was a grotesquely heartbreaking sight.

I hate with a bitter hatred the names of lentils and haricots⁠—those pretentious cheats of the appetite, those tabulated humbugs, those certificated aridities calling themselves human food!

An ounce of either, we are told, is equivalent to—how many pounds?—of the best rump-steak. There are not many ounces of common sense in the brain of him who proves it, or of him who believes it.

Bread, again; we are getting used to bread of poor quality, and ill-made, but the English loaf at its best—such as you were once sure of getting in every village—is the faultless form of the staff of life.

Think of the glorious revolution that could be wrought in our troubled England if it could be ordained that no maid, of whatever rank, might become a wife unless she had proved her ability to make and bake a perfect loaf of bread.

And, in doing so, become perhaps an owl-eyed pedant, to whom would be forever dead the possibility of such enjoyment as I know in these final years. Who can say?

Perhaps the sole condition of my progress to this state of mind and heart which make my happiness was that very stumbling and erring which I so regret.

If historic tomes had a voice, it would sound as one long moan of anguish. Think steadfastly of the past, and one sees that only by defect of imaginative power can any man endure to dwell with it.

History is a nightmare of horrors; we relish it, because we love pictures, and because all that man has suffered is to man rich in interest.

But make real to yourself the vision of every bloodstained page—stand in the presence of the ravening conqueror, the savage tyrant—tread the stones of the dungeon and of the torture-room—feel the fire of the stake—hear the cries of that multitude which no man can number, …

This is wisdom. The time for acquisition has gone by. I am not foolish enough to set myself learning a new language; why should I try to store my memory with useless knowledge of the past?

Come, once more before I die I will read Don Quixote.

Would I have those accents overborne by a living tongue, however welcome its sound at another time?

Jealously I guard my Christmas solitude.

When I came forth, it astonished me to see the softly radiant sky, and to tread on the moist earth; my dream expected a windswept canopy of cold grey, and all beneath it the gleam of new-fallen snow.

It is a piety to turn awhile and live with the dead, and who can so well indulge it as he whose Christmas is passed in no unhappy solitude?

I would not now, if I might, be one of a joyous company; it is better to hear the long-silent voices, and to smile at happy things which I alone can remember.

More enlightened critics, if they use the word at all, do so carelessly; when speaking with more precision, they call the English “pharisaic”—and come nearer the truth.

Our vice is self-righteousness.

We are essentially an Old Testament people; Christianity has never entered into our soul; we see ourselves as the Chosen, and by no effort of spiritual aspiration can attain unto humility. In this there is nothing hypocritic.