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Page 250 - SLEEP, Silence' child, sweet father of soft rest, Prince, whose approach peace to all mortals brings, Indifferent host to shepherds and to kings, Sole comforter of minds with grief...
Page 77 - Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock, The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear, And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.
Page 289 - A chill, of something that was almost fear, passed over her listener's cold, keen, courageous nature: he, too, held that which was concealed from her, — if she avenged treachery thus ? "Vengeance, madame?" he said, scarcely caring what triviality of speech served to screen his thoughts. " Surely nothing so barbarous lingers amid so much worldly wisdom, nothing so ferocious harbors amid so much divine witchery ?
Page 33 - ... liberty of his nature revolted as from a galley-slave's fetters. In Erceldoune's creed a landless gentleman was worthy of his blood so long as he was free — no longer. Therefore he entered the messenger service; and, on the whole, the life, which he had now led for about a score of years, suited him as well as any, save a soldier's, could have done; the constant travel, the hard riding, the frequent peril, the life of cities alternating with the life of adventure — these were to his taste....
Page 60 - Jassy, charged with a special mission, to whom the despatches which Erceldoune bore carried special instructions, touching on delicate matters of moment to the affairs of central and eastern Europe, and to the part which would be played by Great Britain in the event of the freedom of the southern States, and the success of the liberal party in Athens, Hungary, or Venetia.
Page 52 - All sound things are simple, monsieur ! It is the sham and rotten ones that want an intricate scaffolding to keep them from falling; the perfect arch stands without girders. ' Panem et Circenses ' will always be the first article of good governments; when the people are in good humor they never seethe into malcontents.
Page 37 - ... Well !— I think he will die a violent death." " Good gracious ! " said the peer, with a little shiver. Why?" "I never analyse!" laughed Victor, softly. "I think so, — because I think so. He will get shot in a duel, perhaps, for saying some barbaric truth or other in the teeth of policy." " Who is that you are prophesying for with such charmingly horrible romance ? " asked a very pretty woman. " Fellow we met on the moor,
Page 123 - ... somewhat, while the other shook His hair back from his eyes to look Their longest at us; then the boat, I know not how, turned sharply round, Laying her whole side on the sea As a leaping fish does; from the lee, Into the weather, cut somehow Her sparkling path beneath our bow; And so went off, as with a bound, Into the rosy and golden half Of the sky...
Page 321 - Eoman bronze of Milo. As he shook the drenching spray from his hair, and swam against the current, looking upward at the sky where the dawn was just breaking, all the beauty that life might know seemed suddenly to rise on him in revelation. There is an eastern fable that tells how, when Paradise faded from earth, a single rose was saved and treasured by an angel, who gives to every mortal, sooner or later in his life, one breath of fragrance from the immortal flower — one alone.
Page 46 - ... king-bird reeled and fell ! But to draw the parable would not have been at all like his vigorous nature; — a state courier has not much habitude or taste for Oriental metaphors and highly-spiced .romances, and he had too much of the soldier, the Shikari, the man of the world and the Arab combined, to leave him anything whatever of the poet or the dreamer. Men of action may have grave, but they never have visionary thoughts, and life with Erceldoune was too gallant, strong, and rapid a stream...

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