Sublime

‘Hello,’ he said, intending a reproof. ‘Hello,’ said the boy. He had the ease of a creature never told it was a sinner from the womb.

High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder those poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable.

used the very words of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra to express my dismay: ‘ “Did not I tell your worship, to mind what you were about for they were only windmills? And no one could have made any mistake about it but one who had something of the same kind in his head.” ’

‘Wrong,’ he said. ‘A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him. He will starve his family for a month to buy you a pure-white yearling calf. If he can afford it, he will buy you a hundred.’

Edward VII ruled the British Empire with a slightly pudgy cigar-stained hand, assuring his subjects that duty was important but so too was fun. “It doesn’t matter what you do,” he said, “so long as you don’t frighten the horses.”

But there can be no question of the importance of Dickens as a human event in history; a sort of conflagration and transfiguration in the very heart of what is called the conventional Victorian era; a naked flame of mere natural genius, breaking out in a man without culture, without tradition, without help from historic religions or philosophies or

She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker,5 if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said ‘Exactly’ to

He was one of those to whom nature has given the desire without the power of artistic expression.