Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835-1902): A Memoir, Volume 2

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Macmillan and Company, Limited, 1919

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Page 363 - HAIL, holy Light, offspring of heaven first-born, Or of the eternal co-eternal beam, May I express thee unblamed ? since God is light, And never but in unapproached light Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence increate.
Page 350 - That little lame lady's face is with me still; Never a day but what, on every one, She dwells with me as dwell she ever will. She said she wished I knew not wrong from right; It was not that; I knew, and would have chosen Wrong if I could, but, in my own despite, Power to choose wrong in my chilled veins was frozen. 'Tis said that if a woman woo, no man Should leave her till she have prevailed; and, true, A man will yield for pity if he can, But if the flesh rebels what can he do ? I could not; hence...
Page 418 - Above all things let no unwary reader do me the injustice of believing in me. In that I write at all I am among the damned. If he must believe in anything, let him believe in the music of Handel, the painting of Giovanni Bellini, and in the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians.
Page 381 - You do not suppose that he is the only police spy in Paris. — After his visit I made inquiries, and I heard that since 1830, when he was placed at the head of his department, he had lived a middle-class life of the strictest respectability ; the only fault I have to find with it is that it is too perfect a disguise.
Page 104 - I did this in 1864, and if I had gone on doing things out of my own head instead of making studies I should have been all right.
Page 201 - But the light in you was stronger and clearer than ours, For you came straighter, from God and, whereas we had learned, ' You had never forgotten. Three minutes more and then Out, out into the night you go, So guide you and guard you Heaven and fare you well!
Page 460 - Beagle,' as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent.
Page 29 - ... nunc agilis fio et mersor civilibus undis, virtutis verae custos rigidusque satelles; nunc in Aristippi furtim praecepta relabor et mihi res, non me rebus subiungere conor.
Page 456 - ... of the manner, too, in which Mr. Darwin had been abetted by those who should have been the first to detect the fallacy which had misled him; of the hotbed of intrigue which science has now become; of the disrepute into which we English must fall as a nation if such practices as Mr. Darwin had attempted in this case were to be tolerated; - when I thought of all this, I felt that though prayers for the repose of dead men's souls might be unavailing, yet a defence of their work and memory, no matter...
Page 350 - ... Hard though I tried to love I tried in vain. For she was plain and lame and fat and short, Forty and over-kind. Hence it befell That, though I loved her in a certain sort, Yet did I love too wisely but not well. Ah ! had she been more beauteous or less kind She might have found me of another mind. And now, though twenty years are come and gone, That little lame lady's face is with me still; Never a day but what, on every one, She dwells with me as dwell she ever will.

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