s?--without an irresistible sense that to have sailed away, in
vaguest hazard, into the endless mystery of the utterly unknown, must
have had a sweetness and a greatness in it that is never to be extracted
from "the tour of the world in ninety days."

* * *

"She takes a whim for him; a fancy of a month; he thinks it heaven and
eternity. She has ruined him. His genius is burned up; his youth is
dead; he will do nothing more of any worth. Women like her are like the
Indian drugs, that sleep and kill. How is that any fault of mine? He
could see the thing she was. If he will fling his soul away upon a
creature lighter than thistle-down, viler than a rattlesnake's poison,
poorer and quicker to pass than the breath of a gnat--whose blame is
that except his own? There was a sculptor once, you know, that fell to
lascivious worship of the marble image he had made; well,--poets are not
even so far wise as that. They make an image out of the gossamer rainbow
stuff of their own dreams, and then curse heaven and earth because it
dissolves to empty air in their fond arms--whose blame is that? The
fools are made so----"

* * *

Not only the fly on the spoke takes praise to itself for the speed of
the wheel, but the stone that would fain have hindered it, says, when
the wheel unhindered has passed it, "Lo! see how much I helped!"

* * *

The woman makes or mars the man: the man the woman. Mythology had no
need of the Fates.

There is only one; the winged blind god that came by night to Psyche.

* * *

All in a moment his art perished.

When a human love wakes it crushes fame like a dead leaf, and all the
spirits and ministers of the mind shrink away before it, and can no more
allure, no more console, but, sighing, pass into silence and are dumb.

* * *

Life, without a central purpose around which it can revolve, is like a
star that has fallen out of its orbit. With a great affection or a great
aim gone, the practical life may go on loosely, indifferently,
mechanically, but it takes no grip on outer things, it has no vital
interest, it gravitates to nothing.

* * *

Men who dwell in solitude are superstitious. There is no "chance" for
them.

The common things of earth and air to them grow portents: and it is
easier for them to believe that the universe revolves to serve the
earth, than to believe that m